Punishment with Kisses (3 page)

She was always doing things like that when we were younger. I remember one time when we were kids and Ash was in trouble for something—I don’t remember what, since usually it seemed like she could do no wrong. But I do remember Ash had been sent to her room alone. Even back then Ash couldn’t stand to be alone. She cracked open her door and stood there whispering my name until I came to see what the fuss was.

Then Ash looked me right in the eyes and slammed her hand in the door. On purpose. She broke two of her fingers and had to go to the hospital. But her plaintive wails brought Father running and her lies convinced him I’d been responsible. Ash was released from solitary and I took her place in the doghouse, so it was a win-win situation all around for her.

I didn’t want to give her that kind of satisfaction now, so instead I grabbed the pair of odd binocular-like sunglasses that were an expensive good-bye gift from Mark, who somehow thought bird watching might bring me solace in his post-graduation absence. I’d never watched a bird in my life, and I didn’t intend to start, but I had realized that the spectacles appeared to others as simply a pair of peculiar looking sunglasses. No one would notice me people watching from my room, though with these telescoping super-strength lenses I could practically see every pore, every hair on each person’s body.

I could stoically relax on my balcony, sit in my reclining redwood patio lounge holding my novel, and peer over the pages at Ash and what I was beginning to suspect was a constant parade of lovers. I felt simultaneously intrigued and repelled by the sight of so many of them fawning over my sister like she was an adorable but doomed SPCA puppy begging for a home. What did Ash offer that turned normally independent people into simpering fools? If I paid close attention, would I catch a glimpse of her secret ingredient? Was it something intrinsic to her soul or could I apply it like a glossy lipstick? Could it magically transform me externally, the way Tea’s words did in my mind?

Ash had always enchanted other people. When we were young girls being trotted out at Father’s cocktail parties for show and tell, the partygoers would always gather around sweet, pig-tailed Ash. At one of Father’s office holiday parties, when Ash was maybe eight or nine, she got on stage while the band was on a break and announced that she had a special treat for the audience. She was dressed in a little red velvet pantsuit with white fur trim that my mother must have helped her pick out. I was still too terrified to speak to people unless forced, and so I stood there, slack jawed, as enamored of my sister as the rest of the audience. She was everything I wanted to be, back then and still now. Beautiful, smart, charming, and truly unafraid of anything. At the party, I kept hiding below the buffet table, stuffing my face and wondering how soon I could get out of there while Ash was charming the pants off of Father’s colleagues.

Soon all eyes were on Ash as a band member handed her a microphone and she started belting out a perfect rendition of “Santa Baby.” We’d been singing Christmas carols in front of the mirror in our underwear for weeks, karaoke style, so we both knew every single word. But watching Ash up there, I realized that she brought something to the song I never could. We weren’t even teenagers yet, but there was something faintly womanly about Ash, like a twenty-year-old trapped in a nine-year-old’s body. All eyes were on her as she winked and smiled and sang in a Betty Boop tone. When she finished, the crowd applauded and gushed and Father beamed with pride.

For years afterward, I would think of that party, of how Ash could walk into any situation and charm people. She would sometimes take me under her wing, telling me how to make an entrance like she did, but just as often she’d mock me or push me aside when others were around. Always, we seemed to be competing for Father’s affection, and always, Ash won.

Even in our family, I seemed to be on the outside of Ash’s world, looking on as everyone fluttered around her, flitting about and marveling.

So that summer I pretended to be a birdwatcher looking for that endangered species. I pretended I was an anthropologist observing a foreign culture, longing to learn the sacred rituals of a society I could never truly enter.

Hours of spying slipped into days, and I soon decided I was getting far more from observing Ash than I would ever garner from my novels and their make-believe worlds. I started bringing a notepad out to the balcony with me, jotting down random things I noticed, hoping somehow a pattern would emerge and I could unravel the secrets of this alien world. If nothing else, I told myself, this would enliven my own writing, help me infuse an element of realness that my English professors had always complained was lacking from my characters, which they criticized as being more caricatures than living, breathing, believable individuals.

Watching Ash was like viewing my own private reality dating program. Each new day brought another surprising revelation. Father, an archconservative Republican, must have been having a fit, knowing what she was doing out there, and yet he never said anything to that effect, he never went out and shut her party down. Maybe he was able to pretend it wasn’t happening. Maybe going down there would have confronted him with the vulgar truth, that his little girl wasn’t a little girl any longer, that she was very much an adult, a sexually aggressive woman who was hanging around the pool with all manner of riffraff, drinking and smoking pot, lighting up casually, and passing spliffs as if they were simply sharing cigarettes.

There were colorful drinks strewn about, drinks that could pass for punch, but I could tell from the way the girls giggled and tittered that there was booze in them for certain. Each new day, Ash seemed to ratchet up the poolside debauchery, as though challenging Father to step in, pushing his limits to see when he would break. Even I was surprised by his restraint. He seemed to be combating her by fighting a cold war, trying to freeze her out by utterly ignoring Ash’s increasing decadence. It couldn’t continue indefinitely. Eventually Ash would push him too far and Father would explode, raging as white hot as any atomic bomb. I couldn’t help but wonder how many people would end up getting hurt, casualties in their little war. Would it be worth it in the end? What did she hope to prove?

I couldn’t see
everything
that was happening down there by the pool, but over the next few weeks I saw enough. Cocktails drunk, joints smoked, drugs passed, and pills popped, right there, directly under Father’s nose. The only solace was that Father’s increasing absences prevented him from witnessing every immoral spectacle. Somehow my homecoming and Ash’s hedonistic explosion had coincided with Father’s sudden disappearance. He was no longer home for dinner every night. In fact, some nights he didn’t come home at all.

The stepmonster explained Father was staying overnight in town because of his work, and maybe that was true or maybe it was an excuse. What did I know? Father wasn’t talking to me. His phone calls were relayed secondhand through an untrustworthy conductor. Tabitha could have reason to lie. Maybe Father was cheating on her. Maybe now that Tabitha was closing in on thirty she had lost her appeal and he was trading her in for a younger model. Maybe he wasn’t that different from Ash after all. Maybe he was staying out late drinking or shacking up with another, younger version of Tabitha.

Our place in Lake Oswego was less than an hour outside Portland, but Father kept an apartment in the city, a condo in the Pearl District for nights he had to work late. I’d never been there, but he used to stay there a lot before Mother died. That all changed when he married Tabitha. Maybe it was because she was just nineteen and he didn’t want to leave her alone, or didn’t dare. Maybe he thought someone else—a neighbor, the pool boy, the UPS guy—would catch her eye if he wasn’t there to keep her company. Whatever the cause, in the years since Mother’s death, Father had come home nearly every single night. I guess that’s what happens when middle-aged men marry teenagers, they have to watch their women a lot harder to make sure no Fabio-wannabe tennis instructor steals them away. It was also probably why Father hired our gardener, whose name I’d finally learned was Gualterio, even though Father insisted we call him Bob. He was about sixty years old, in the U.S. without papers, and probably poor as dirt, which I guess made Father feel comfortable Tabitha wouldn’t run away with him.

Poor Bob, though, because he had to put up with Father’s racist condescension and Ash’s Caligula-style partying while he was just trying to keep the lawn mowed and shrubbery trimmed. Only that summer, I noticed that the grass seemed a little longer than usual and the topiary wasn’t maintaining its customary definition. And every time I peeked out at Ash’s wild poolside parties, I could see Bob lingering in the shadows, watching. I wondered what he was getting out of it, staring at all those young, supple bodies, watching the depraved debauchery playing out in the summer heat. I hoped he had someone to go home and share his hard-on with and he didn’t just have to resort to beating off alone in the tool shed.

I stole another peek at the boys by the pool and noticed something surprising. The guys who’d been hanging around Ash all week weren’t guys at all. They were women. Very masculine gals, to be sure, but girls, nonetheless. Having grown up in the Northwest, where even the straight women were utilitarian and capable of tossing eighty-pound bales of hay one-handed, it said a lot if someone’s masculinity so overshadowed all visual cues to the contrary that I couldn’t tell they were female-bodied.

But there they were, young women sporting swim trunks and T-shirts and the occasional ball cap. Of course, there were more feminine girls too, girls like Ash and a retro Bettie Page girl wearing a one piece, and a girl with glasses who wore surf shorts and stayed out of the water, lounging poolside with a fruity cocktail. Another girl wore a different color thong bikini every day, and a short girl with piercings in her lip, nose, belly button, and God knows where else, seemed to like having the details of her many tattoos slowly outlined by Ash’s stray fingers.

Just like the men who preceded them, these women seemed to fawn over Ash, vying with each other to be the one to touch her, even casually. I watched the way their fingers brushed Ash’s when they handed her a drink, the way they hoisted her on their shoulders for a game of chicken, or took their time rubbing sunscreen lotion on her legs, chest, belly.

It was odd to watch them compete for her attention. Ash seemed to choose a winner after a while, allowing only one girl to bring her drinks, pour sun-warmed pool water over her bronzed body, or light her cigarettes. But her fancy never lasted long. A few hours and the games began again, the competition for Ash’s favor. Some brought her gifts. Others did dangerous dives, risking head injury in shallow water, or picked fights with each other. It was like watching
Wild Kingdom
during rutting season when the young bucks crashed their antlers together in a display of virility and an effort to court single does. Were humans driven by the same base instincts? Were the tens of thousands of years of evolution, the accomplishments of brilliant minds like Socrates and Shakespeare and Madame Curie thrown out the window when it came to sexual impulses and dating rituals?

A few of Ash’s suitors seemed to rise above and differentiate themselves from the masses. One girl brought along a guitar and serenaded Ash with songs. I couldn’t make out the words from my balcony, and I’ve never mastered lip reading, but it was pretty clear the singer was professing her undying love. Ash looked bemused. She received each of her subjects’ pathetic adorations like her Royal Highness, sitting on her throne, deigning to bestow the slightest smirk to those that pleased her with their antics.

*

The first time I witnessed it, the sheer shock of Ash fucking another girl in broad daylight threw me off my chair. My disgust was tangible. It made my skin crawl. Why was my sister so vulgar, so crass? For God sake! How come Ash never learned decorum like the rest of us?

That wasn’t really fair. I
knew
she had been taught the rules of polite society. I’d seen Mother in action. So what drove Ash to violate all the tenets of good manners? It was revolting. But I couldn’t turn away. It was like I
had
to watch. I had to pay silent witness to each surrender, see each woman throw her head back or bite her lip or cry out for more. I’d never made a lover respond with such enthusiasm. I’d never even experienced that kind of passion myself, let alone had that kind of sexual power, to bring a lover to their knees, to have them scream my name or beg for me not to stop.

I almost wished I could see more through my Peeping Tom glasses. I wanted to know what it was that Ash was actually doing, how her tongue flicked across that woman’s clit, or how her fingers moved inside this other woman, to elicit such joyful responses. I wanted to be closer, to hear the words the women screamed in their moment of ecstasy. I imagined them as vivid verses, poetry that rivaled the love poems whispered by Sappho.

Watching Ash seemed to evoke the kind of stirring in my loins my college lovers never did. When I realized this, for a moment I was overcome with disgust at myself. What kind of pervert was I? That was my
sister,
for God sake! I suddenly saw Ash standing before me naked, and the image sapped the sexual arousal I’d been feeling. I threw down the sunglasses and vowed never, ever to watch again. I retreated to my room and my books. I decided to go cold turkey.

On my second day of detox, I started to feel like there was a physical struggle going on. I had to fight this force that drew me to the sliding glass door that led out to the balcony. I put all my muscles into it, sweating and straining, but my feet were being pulled out from under me. The balcony was a black hole and I was caught in the gravitational pull. I refused to give in. I vowed to ride this all the way through the pain of withdrawal even if it got as bad as
Trainspotting.
I had to conquer my addiction.