Other Shepards (7 page)

“Holland? You sound out of breath.”

“I was running.”

“How’s your sister?”

“Better since she got her way.”

I imagine Mom on the other end of the line, a silver button earring in one hand while the other cups the mouthpiece. “I can be home by eleven, I think, if Lucy can cover my phone.”

“Don’t worry about us. When we got home—” Then I stop. If I remind her that Annie is painting here this morning, Mom might send me back to Ambrose. “When we got home,” I repeat, more slowly, working out the lie, “Geneva said she felt better, and we’re going back to school after lunch.”

“Really?”

“She said she wanted to start the day over. She was never that sick, it was mostly a temper tantrum.”

Mom exhales through her nose, a sound like wind through leaves. “And you’ll call me if the plan changes? Because I really don’t want you missing school, Holland.”

“Don’t worry about us, Mom. I’ll take care of everything.”

“Well, all right.” Mom sounds uncertain. “If you’re sure. Call if you need me.”

“Bye, Mom.”

The bad aftertaste of deceit lingers in my mouth after I hang up the phone. I run into the kitchen; maybe a cup of Annie’s coffee will smooth it over.

“A couple of things everyone should know about painting a mural,” Annie is saying as I join them. She and my sister sit cross-legged on the kitchen floor. Geneva’s face is rapt with concentration.

“Sit down,” Geneva says, “and listen.”

“This is actually a low-intensity bleach, which cleans the walls of any impurities.” Annie knocks her hand on a large metal pail beside her. “So don’t drink it. There are rags here as well, so today we’ll just scrub, scrub, scrub, then go over the walls with a flat finish, standard undercoat, which is like priming your canvas before you begin your masterpiece. Boring, but it has to be done. These are roller brushes, so it shouldn’t take too long.

“Now, since we’re going with Geneva’s fabulous birds of paradise theme, I’ll draw up the final sketches. The sketches are called thumbnails, and they’ll be our blueprint. Then we make an outline on the wall using chalk, which is thicker than pencil and erases easily with water if you mess up. Painting is the last step. Since we’re doing all our detail in oil, we have to be sure we like the outline, because oil never completely dries, so it’s harder to adjust than chalk. Questions?”

Geneva’s hand shoots up. “How long will it last?”

“It’ll last until you decide to paint over it.”

“No, I mean, how long will it take? To paint the kitchen?”

“A couple of weeks, maybe? We won’t rush it.”

“If we never finish it, then do you stay with us for always?” asks Geneva.

Annie’s smile illuminates her face. “Sorry. Like any job, there’s a beginning and an end,” she says. “Okay, enough talk.” She claps her hands. We rise.

“I’ll get my radio,” Geneva volunteers. She jumps out of the kitchen and hits the stairs running, probably petrified to lose one precious moment with Annie.

“It’s like you put her under a spell,” I say quietly as I rip one of the old pillowcases Annie tosses me.

“You really care about your sister,” she says. “That’s important. I don’t know anything about having a sister. You girls are so close, I can feel the crackle in the air between you.”

“Annie, are you some kind of counselor?” I ask. “Did my dad hire you to help with Geneva?”

“Just a painter. Like I said,” Annie answers cheerfully. “I’m here to spruce up this kitchen, give you something new to look at. But you don’t have to stay here. Go back to school now, if you like.”

“If you don’t mind, I think I’ll stay. To keep an eye on Geneva.”

“Fair enough.”

“What’s fair enough?” Geneva appears, her portable radio in hand.

“It’s fair enough to guess that Holland must have a boyfriend by now, hmm?”

“How’d you know?” Geneva exclaims. “He litters.”

“What’s his name?” Annie asks.

“Louis Littlebird.”

“He’s in ninth grade and he wears a leather jacket like in
Grease
.”

“Quiet, Geneva.”

“How long have you been seeing him?” Annie asks me.

“I’m not. I saw him wrestle, once. But that wasn’t like a date or anything.”

“You should invite him over here to help paint. That’s not like a date or anything, either.”

“No, I don’t think so.” The idea. How out of touch.

“Mom would despise him,” Geneva interjects. “She wouldn’t let him come over. He looks like he’d steal things.”

“Moms are supposed to dislike boyfriends,” says Annie. “The good ones, anyway. It’s the law.”

“Is that guy, the actor, is he your boyfriend?” Geneva asks.

“We have a relationship,” Annie answers with a wink. “But that’s between us.”

The walls are horribly dirty. We find wash pails under the sink and fill them with warm water and bleach. Then we get to work.

“I adore water,” Geneva announces after a while. She wrings out her rag over the pail and stares into the dingy water. “Especially the sound of waves. Down the shore is my favorite place in the whole wide world.”

“Ever seen the beaches in the Caribbean? Now that’s gorgeous.” Annie sighs. “Romantic.”

“No, but we go to Cape May in New Jersey for a couple of weeks every August,” I say. “We’ve only been outside the United States once, to France, when I was eight. Dad won a science award, and we went to the banquet and ceremony and stuff.”

“I got food poisoning from a bad periwinkle,” Geneva says. “That’s all I remember about France.”

“There’s probably more to France than bad periwinkles,” Annie says. “You could go back when you’re older.”

“Our parents stopped traveling after Geneva was born. Before that, they went all over the world.”

“We were named for the places we were conceived in,” Geneva adds. “Our Uncle Nelson told us so last time he visited. Remember Holland? How he pointed his cigar at you and said, ‘Lucky they decided to baptize you for the country, otherwise we’d be calling you Antwerp, my girl,’ and then Mom went, ‘Oh, quiet, Nelson, you ridiculous drunk,’ and then she grabbed away his wine glass and some spilled on the rug—cigar ash, I mean, not wine—and Uncle Nelson stomped it in, not on purpose, although Mom said it was, secretly.”

We laugh together. The parents always had maintained that they named us for places they liked to remember, but until Uncle Nelson’s giveaway, we had never understood why our names had been singled out above other favorites, like Paris and India. Now I take new appreciation in my name, knowing that it is so intimate.

“But after a while they stopped traveling,” I tell Annie. “It was harder, I guess, with a new family. Now we rarely go anywhere at all.”

“Too bad for you. Of course, my friends Dana and Ryan Hubbard vacation every year in Saint Germaine. The good life, hmm?”

“The Hubbards!” I suck in my breath. “How do you know the Hubbards?” The Hubbards are old friends of the parents. They have rented our bungalow in Saint Germaine since before I can remember. The parents never sold the bungalow—once I heard Mom tell Brett and Carla that renting is a better investment, but I am sure there are other, more intricate reasons for their holding onto that property.

The Hubbards are nothing more to me than their blandly smiling faces in some slides and photographs, an entry in Dad’s address book, and the occasional letter that arrives in the mail and contains a few boring paragraphs comparing the weather in Saint Germaine with Seattle’s.

The notes always end with a P.S. request that Geneva and I come visit them in either place, but the parents tell us they’re just being polite—who would really want to look after two young girls, especially during their holiday? So I have never met the Hubbards, and they remain part of another life, built into the dark and secret passages of a different family’s history.

“I’ve known the Hubbards forever,” Annie says. “I painted a mural for them in the pantry of their house down in Saint Germaine. An elm tree.”

“Their pantry? You mean our pantry—it’s our house—they rent it from us!” I turn to my sister. “That’s so strange, don’t you think so, Geneva? I mean, here she’s been to Saint Germaine, and met the Hubbards even, and we didn’t know.”

“I always wanted to see Saint Germaine!” Geneva bursts out. “It looks so adorable in the pictures. We’ve never been to Seattle, either, not that I really want to go there, I hear there’s lots of traffic jams. But I especially want to visit Saint Germaine, more than the shore. More than anywhere.”

“Be quiet, stupid. We can never go there.”

“You be quiet, you said so your stupid self that you wanted to visit.” She looks at Annie. “They all used to visit every year, sometimes twice a year. Mom and Dad said it’s the most beautiful place on earth. There’s tons of slides and pictures of them, on the fishing boat, or at Starling Cove, or—”

“The parents would never take us there! There are a million places to go instead of there!”

“Don’t shout at me, Holland, I’m right here next to you!” Geneva shouts. “And you don’t need to try and make me feel bad when I know you want to see it, too, okay? Just because something happened there seven years before I was even born doesn’t mean I can’t wonder what Saint Germaine’s like, especially since I’ve seen all those pictures of it, and even Brett and Carla stayed at the house last year, and—”

“Time out.” Annie makes a referee’s signal. “Listen, I wouldn’t have brought up Saint Germaine at all if I knew it meant witnessing this shouting match. Let’s get back to work. Holland, since you’re taller, would you wipe over the parts of the wall Geneva can’t reach? Cooperation counts on this project.”

“Sorry, Holland. I didn’t mean to shout,” Geneva mutters, which is so uncharacteristic that I say sorry back.

“What are they like?” I ask after a few minutes.

“Who?”

“The
Hubbards
, Annie. Are they nice?”

“Oh, you should meet them, they’re a pair,” Annie says. “I bet they would love to meet you.”

“The parents wouldn’t let us,” Geneva says through gritted teeth. “They have their own way of doing things, which mostly means doing nothing.”

I give up on the conversation and attack the wall with my rag. The radio moans through one cozy love song after another. I imagine Louis Littlebird standing under the arches of Washington Square Park. He holds a bunch of daisies behind his back and offers them to me as I swing up to greet him, just like in that deodorant commercial. I press my nose into his neck and my cheek brushes the leather of his jacket; my laugh is an unfamiliar, throaty gurgle that I’m sure I could perfect in real life. In my fantasies, I am as Ick as I want to be.

“I’m starving,” Geneva says, breaking into my daydreams.

“Didn’t you pack lunch?” Annie asks. “Eat that.” Geneva frowns; it was not the answer she had hoped for. Annie cooking up omelettes, Annie springing for lunch at Les Deux Gamins—I am sure this is what Geneva wanted. But we unwrap our brown bag lunches without argument and eat our cheese sandwiches, grapes, and shortbread cookies. Geneva talks with her mouth full, firing questions at Annie as she continues to clean the walls.

“How much are you getting paid?” Geneva asks.

“Enough,” Annie answers. “Standard rate.”

“Is art your full-time job?”

“You could say that.”

“Where do you live?”

“Uptown.”

“How high? Seventies, Eighties, Nineties?”

She jabs her thumb northward. “A little higher.” Geneva and I share a look; we have never heard of anyone living higher than Professor Nolan, a friend of Dad’s who lives on 121st Street. Then Geneva resumes her silly questions.

“Are you and Jack married?”

“No.”

“Have you talked about getting married?”

“You know, I don’t think about it.”

“Do you miss him, like right now do you?”

Annie pauses in her work. “Not so much, because I always feel like I’m with him, even when I’m not.”

After lunch, we start priming. Annie is tireless, spinning on the toes of her ugly shoes as she directs our brush strokes. Priming the walls with our base coat takes up most of the early afternoon. After we are finished I am exhausted, ready to lounge in the den with a cool drink in one hand and the remote control in the other.

“So,” Annie says as she stands in the middle of the kitchen, hands on her hips, surveying our work, “who’s ready for a downtown adventure? We have time.” She pops the paint-thickened roller from its handle and wraps it in newspaper before dropping it in the trash.

“Adventure, adventure!” Geneva executes a poorly skilled Irish step dance around the kitchen. “Let’s go!”

“I don’t know.” I hold my breath, indecisive. “People might report us, since we should be in school.”

“This is New York,” Annie says. “People are too busy with their own lives to care about yours. Of course, anybody who wants to stay home or go back to school is certainly allowed.”

Geneva needs no coaxing. I decide I have to follow, if only to baby-sit.

T
HE E TRAIN CARRIES
a handful of weary passengers who stare at us as we slide into the plastic seats. A few senior citizens, a man eating from a bag of rust-colored chips, and a couple with matching purple Kool-Aid dyed hair and silver rings stuck in their bellybuttons all stare a moment and then dismiss us. I wonder how I appear to strangers: a prissy Catholic-school girl wearing a boiled wool jacket (I couldn’t find my windbreaker) and jeans.

“We’ll get off at Spring Street,” Annie says. “Decent shopping there.”

“Shopping?” Geneva asks. Her hands are packaged neatly on her lap. She hadn’t planned on taking the subway; nor had I, but it’s easier for me to adjust to the unexpected than it is for my sister. She looks as if she might be sick. To Geneva, a subway is a filthy, hissing, germ-infested beast far more dangerous than his brother—the barely domesticated but tolerable taxicab. Annie’s insistence that subways are quicker was the last word over Geneva’s protest. Now she chews her lip and tightens herself into the smallest amount of space that her body will permit.

The advertisements pasted to the subway walls are the wallpaper of a world more edgy than the manicured lap dogs and chicken-wire-ringed shrubbery of our neighborhood.
HANDS ARE MEANT FOR HOLDING
bellows the type block across one poster, showing a black-and-white photograph of a knuckle-clubbed fist. Phone numbers and addresses of local battered women’s shelters are printed in large type below the fist. Another poster advises people to get regular checkups for the diseases they might or might not have. Still another bulletin lectures on the dangers of needle-sharing. Geneva’s eyes are buggy, staring at the forlorn faces of poster board junkies.