Peaceable Kingdom (2 page)

My sister didn’t go to Florida, or anyway not yet. Eventually she recovered—recovered or stopped pretending. Every night after dinner Mother said, “She’s eating well. She’s improving.” Talking to strange dogs in the yard was apparently not a problem. Father’s problem was a real problem; my sister’s would improve. I knew that Mother felt this way, and once more she was right.

One night Marcy telephoned, Mother called my sister, and my sister came out of her room. She took the phone and told Marcy, “Sure, great. See you. Bye.”

“Marcy knows about a party,” she said.

Mother said, “Wonderful, dear,” though in the past there were always fights about going to parties with Marcy.

We all stayed up till my sister came home, though we all pretended to sleep. My window was over the front door and I watched her on the front step, struggling to unlock the door, holding something bulky pressed against her belly. At last she disappeared inside. Something hit the floor with a thud. I heard my sister running. There was so much commotion we all felt justified rushing downstairs. Mother helped my father down, they came along rather quickly.

We found my sister in the kitchen. It was quiet and very dark. The refrigerator was open, not for food but for light. Bathed in its glow, my sister was rhythmically stroking a large iguana that stood poised, alert, its head slightly raised, on the butcher block by the stove.

In the equalizing darkness my father saw almost as well as we did. “Jesus Christ,” he said.

My sister said, “He was a little freaked. You can try turning the light on.”

Only then did we notice that the lizard’s foot was bandaged. My sister said, “This drunken jerk bit off one of his toes. He got all the guys at the party to bet that he wouldn’t do it. I just waded in and took the poor thing and the guy just gave it up. The asshole couldn’t have cared very much if he was going to bite its toes off.”

“Watch your language,” Mother said. “What a cruel thing to do! Is this the kind of teenager you’re going to parties with?”

“Animals,” my father said. After that there was a silence, during which all of us thought that once my father would have unwrapped the bandage and taken a look at that foot.

“His name’s Reynaldo,” my sister said.

“Sounds Puerto Rican,” said Mother.

Once there would have been a fight about her keeping the iguana, but like some brilliant general, my sister had retreated and recouped and emerged from her bedroom, victorious and in control. At that moment I hated her for always getting her way, for always outlasting everyone and being so weird and dramatic and never letting you know for sure what was real and what she was faking.

Reynaldo had the run of my sister’s room, no one dared open the door. After school she’d lie belly down on her bed, cheek to cheek with Reynaldo. And in a way it was lucky that my father couldn’t see that.

One night the phone rang. Mother covered the receiver and said, “Thank you, Lord. It’s a boy.”

It was a boy who had been at the party and seen my sister rescue Reynaldo. His name was Greg; he was a college student, studying for a business degree.

After he and my sister went out a few times, Mother invited Greg to dinner. I ate roast beef and watched him charm everyone but me. He described my sister grabbing the iguana out of its torturer’s hands. He said, “When I saw her do that, I thought, This is someone I want to know better.” He and my parents talked about her like some distant mutual friend. I stared hard at my sister, wanting her to miss Jimmy, too, but she was playing with her food, I couldn’t tell what she was thinking.

Greg had a widowed mother and two younger sisters; he’d gotten out of the draft by being their sole support. He said he wouldn’t go anyway, he’d go to Canada first. No one mentioned Reynaldo, though we could hear him scrabbling jealously around my sister’s room.

Reynaldo wasn’t invited on their dates and neither, obviously, was I. I knew Greg didn’t drive onto the ice or break into furniture stores. He took my sister to Godard movies and told us how much she liked them.

One Saturday my sister and Greg took Reynaldo out for a drive. And when they returned—I waited up—the iguana wasn’t with them.

“Where’s Reynaldo?” I asked.

“A really nice pet shop,” she said. And then for the first time I understood that Jimmy was really dead.

Not long after that my father died. His doctors had made a mistake. It was not a disease of the retina but a tumor of the brain. You’d think they would have known that, checked for that right away, but he was a scientist, they saw themselves in him and didn’t want to know. Before he died he disappeared, one piece at a time. My sister and I slowly turned away so as not to see what was missing.

Greg was very helpful throughout this terrible time. Six months after my father died, Greg and my sister got married. By then he’d graduated and got a marketing job with a potato-chip company. Mother and I lived alone in the house—as we’d had, really, for some time. My father and sister had left so gradually that the door hardly swung shut behind them. Father’s Buick sat in the garage, as it had since he’d lost his vision, and every time we saw it we thought about all that had happened.

My sister and Greg bought a house nearby; sometimes Mother and I went for dinner. Greg told us about his work and the interesting things he found out. In the Northeast they liked the burnt chips, the lumpy misshapen ones, but down South every chip had to be pale and thin and perfect.

“A racial thing, no doubt,” I said, but no one seemed to hear, though one of Mother’s favorite subjects was race relations down South. I’d thought my sister might laugh or get angry, but she was a different person. A slower, solid, heavier person who was eating a lot of chips.

One afternoon the doorbell rang, and it was Jimmy Kowalchuk. It took me a while to recognize him; he didn’t have his beard. For a second—just a second—I was afraid to open the door. He was otherwise unchanged except that he’d got even thinner, and looked even less Polish and even more Puerto Rican.

He was wearing army fatigues. I was glad Mother wasn’t home. He gave me a hug, my first ever from him, and lifted me off the ground. He said no, he was never dead, never even missing.

He said, “Some army computer glitch, some creep’s clerical error.” My father’s death had made it easier to believe that people made such mistakes, and for one dizzying moment I allowed myself to imagine that maybe Jimmy’s being alive meant my father was, too.

“You got older,” Jimmy said. “This is like
The Twilight Zone
.” And he must have thought so—that time had stopped in his absence. I invited him in, made him sit down, and then told him about my sister.

Jimmy got up and left the house. He didn’t ask whom she’d married. He didn’t ask where they lived, though I knew he was going to find her.

Once again I waited, counting down the hours. This time, although weeks passed, it was like counting one two three. Four—the phone rang. It was Greg. He had come home from the office and found my sister packed and gone.

A week later my sister called collect from St. Petersburg, Florida. She said Jimmy knew a guy, a buddy from Vietnam, he had found Jimmy a rental house and a job with a roofing company. They had hurricanes down there that would rip the top of your house off. She emphasized the hurricane part, as if that made it all make sense. In fact, she seemed so sure about the sensibleness of her situation that she made me promise to tell Mother and Greg she’d called and that she was fine.

Mother had less trouble believing that my sister had been kidnapped than that she’d left Greg and taken off with her dead boyfriend from Vietnam. It was a lot to process at once; she’d seen Jimmy buried. Greg had never heard of Jimmy, which made me wonder about my sister. I thought about Reynaldo, how forcefully she had seized him, how easily she’d let him go.

My sister had called from a pay phone. All she’d said was “St. Petersburg.” Mother telephoned Mrs. Kowalchuk and got Jimmy’s address from her. Afterwards Mother said, “The woman thinks it’s a miracle. The army loses her son, she goes through hell, and she thinks it’s the will of God.”

Mother wrote my sister a letter. A month passed. There was no answer. By now Greg was in permanent shock, though he still went to work. One night he told us about a dipless chip now in the blueprint stage. Then even Mother knew we were alone, and her eyes filled with tears. She said, “Florida! It’s warm there. When is your Easter vacation?”

We took my father’s Buick, a decision that almost convinced us that some reason besides paralysis explained its still being in our garage. I sat up front beside Mother, scrunched low in the spongy seat. States went by. The highway was always the same. There was nothing to watch except Mother, staring furiously at the road. Though the temperature rose steadily, Mother wouldn’t turn off the heat and by Florida I was riding with my head out the window, for air, and also working on a tan for Jimmy.

It was easy finding the address we got from Mrs. Kowalchuk. They were living in a shack, but newly painted white, and with stubby marigolds lining the cracked front walk.

“Tobacco Road,” said Mother.

Then Mother and I saw Jimmy working out in the yard. His back was smooth and golden and muscles churned under his skin as he swayed from side to side, planing something—a door. Behind him a tree with shiny leaves sagged under its great weight of grapefruit, and sunlight dappled the round yellow fruit and the down on Jimmy’s shoulders.

Jimmy stopped working and turned and smiled. He didn’t seem surprised to see us. As he came toward us a large dog roused itself from the ground at his feet, a longhaired white dog so much like the one my sister spoke to in our yard that for a moment I felt faint and had to lean on Mother.

Mother shook me off. She hardly noticed the dog. She was advancing on Jimmy.

“I wasn’t dead, it was a mistake.” Jimmy sounded apologetic.

“Obviously,” said Mother. Then she told me not to move and went into the house.

I couldn’t have moved if I’d wanted. Every muscle had fused, every tiny flutter and tic felt grossly magnified and disgusting. I had never seen Jimmy without a shirt. I wanted to touch his back. He said, “I got my grapefruit tree.”

“Obviously,” I said in Mother’s voice, and Jimmy grinned and we laughed. On the table lay a pile of tools. He wasn’t stabbing them between his fingers. He must have gotten that out of his system, dying and coming back.

Even though it was Jimmy’s house, we felt we couldn’t go in. Every inch of space was taken up by what my mother and sister were saying. Where was Jimmy’s Malibu? We walked to a cafeteria and stood in a line of elderly couples deciding between the baked fish and the chicken. Jimmy couldn’t be served there, he wasn’t wearing a shirt. The manager was sorry, it was a Florida law. Jimmy had gone to Vietnam and been lost in a computer and now couldn’t even get a cup of cafeteria coffee. But I couldn’t say that, my head was ringing with things I couldn’t say—for example, that I had waited for him, and my sister hadn’t.

Haifa block from Jimmy’s house, we saw an upsetting sight—my mother and sister in Mother’s car with the engine running.

“Going for lunch?” Jimmy said. But we all knew they weren’t.

Mother told me to get in back. Jimmy looked in and I saw him notice my sister’s suitcase. He did nothing to stop us—that was the strangest part. He let me get in and let us take off and stood there and watched us go.

I never knew, I never found out what Mother said to my sister. Or maybe it wasn’t what Mother said, perhaps it was all about Jimmy. Once again I thought of Reynaldo and my sister’s giving him up. If I never knew what had happened with that, how could I ask about Jimmy? You assume you will ask the important questions, you will get to them sooner or later, an idea that ignores two things: the power of shyness, the fact of death.

That should have been the last time I saw Jimmy Kowalchuk—a wounded young god glowing with sun in a firmament of grapefruit. But there was one more time, nearer home, in the dead of winter.

Before that, Greg took my sister back. They went on as if nothing had happened. Greg got a promotion. They moved to a nicer house. I saw my sister sometimes. Jimmy was not a subject. I never asked about him, his name never came up. I would talk about school sometimes, but she never seemed to be listening. Once she said, out of nowhere, “I guess people want different things at different times in their lives.”

I was a senior in high school when my sister was killed. Her car jumped a divider on the Sunrise Highway. It was a new car Greg kept well maintained, so it was nobody’s fault.

On the way to the funeral Mother sat between me and Greg. When my sister went back to Greg, Mother had gone back to him, too. But that day, in the funeral car, she was talking to me.

“What was I doing?” Mother said. “I knew I couldn’t make you girls happy. I was just trying to give you the chance to be happy if you wanted. I thought that life was a corridor with doors that opened and shut as you passed, and I was just trying to keep them from slamming on you.”

The reality of my sister’s death hadn’t come home to me yet, and though my father’s dying had taught me that death was final, perhaps Jimmy’s reappearance had put that in some doubt. Guiltily I wondered if Jimmy would be at my sister’s funeral, as if it were a party at which he might show up.

Jimmy came with his mother, a tiny woman in black. He was gritty, unshaven, tragically handsome in a wrinkled suit and dark glasses. He looked as if he’d hitchhiked or rode up on the Greyhound.

I went and stood beside Jimmy. No one expected that. After the service I left with him. Not even I could believe it. All the relatives watched me leave, Mother and Greg and my sister’s friend Marcy. I wondered if this was how Jimmy felt, driving out onto the ice.

Jimmy was driving a cousin’s rusted Chevy Nova. We dropped his mother at her house. Jimmy and I kept going. I could tell he’d been drinking. He must have given up on his rule about endangering other people. Finally I was alone with him, but it wasn’t what I’d pictured. I wondered which friend I could call if I needed someone to pick me up.