Sister Mischief (31 page)

An indistinct female figure approaches through the beveled glass and pulls open the door. To my surprise, it turns out to be Ada, who must be home for Thanksgiving. Because Tess’s the only one of us who has an older sister, and because Ada’s eight years older, she was impossibly cool to us growing up: beautiful, talented, a little wild. Always had a boyfriend, always getting in trouble and charming her way out of it. She studied musical theater at NYU, and she’s been an actress/waitress in New York since then; I think we’ve all had fantasies of running away to New York and showing up on Ada’s doorstep panting
Teach me,
or at least I have.

“Esme!” she greets me. “Come on in. Was Tess expecting you? She’s upstairs.”

“Thanks.” I step across the threshold, entering the warm Glade cookie aroma of the Grinnell house and its multiple chandeliers, its sweeping spiral staircase, its huge black-marble kitchen and wine cellar downstairs. “Naw, I just decided to stop by,” I say. “Girl, you gotta tell me about New York. Is it, like, amazing?”

“It’s — it’s, yeah, it’s still amazing. I mean, it wears on a body a little. But it’s so much fucking better than here.” She laughs, the freckles on her nose dancing; she’s holding a glass of white wine exactly the corn-silk color of her hair, Tess’s hair. “Are you thinking of applying to any schools in the city?” OMG, she just calls it
the city;
she doesn’t even have to specify
what
city.

“Balls, I don’t know. All I know is that I want to go someplace really far away from here.”

She nods, her side ponytail bobbing. “Honey, I’ve been there.” She takes a pregnant pause. “Look, Esme, I really hope you won’t think I’m being nosy or anything, but Tess’s told me some of what’s been going on, and I gotta tell you, I’ve been”— her hands flop over each other as she gestures through her train of thought —“I’ve just been feeling for you, wondering how you are.”

“Um. Thanks, I think,” I say.

“I’m just saying that — fuck.” She looks around. “Jesus, this house makes me feel like I’m
choking,
do you know what I mean? Come out to the gazebo with me.”

“Um. Okay.” I trot after her as she throws on a black leather bomber jacket, her side ponytail fanning on its shoulder, and Tessie’s blue Ugg boots. We sneak through the living room and out the sliding glass door in the kitchen to the backyard, to the gazebo where I got drunk and came out for the first time. It feels like years ago instead of months; nostalgia takes a swallow of my heart as we trudge through the snow. We track snow into the gazebo and perch on a bench, trying to place as little of our butts on the frozen wood as possible. She takes out a Lucky Strike filter, holding it between black-nailed fingers, and lights it.

“I started smoking these because I liked the way the pack looked. Isn’t that stupid?” she tells me. We both study the red-and-white bull’s-eye of the Lucky package. I wait for her to tell me what I’m doing here.

“You know what’s funny?” I shake my head. She takes a drag and exhales speaking, the smoke indistinguishable from her breath. “No one tells you how hard it is.” She offers me the pack; I decline.

“How hard what is?” I ask.

“All of it. Growing up,” she says.

“Yeah,” I say.

She turns to look at me. “So were you in love with her?”

“Yeah.” I don’t face her, keeping her in my peripheral vision.

She turns back to the house. “Then let people say what the hell they want. You gotta get yourself into a city. Things are easier to handle in the city.”

“Ada, what were you trying to say before?”

“Fuck, I don’t know.” She sucks in through her teeth. “I guess it’s like this. Tess was never the fuckup in the family. That was my job. I fought with Mom; I snuck out; I got arrested; I didn’t go to the school I was supposed to go to. Tess never had any room to push boundaries until one day she woke up sixteen and nothing made sense anymore. And until I wasn’t around to steal all the attention.”

“Yeah,” I say, not sure what she’s getting at.

“You’re a good friend for her.” She shivers, then laughs. “Why the fuck did I drag you out here, anyway? Look, I gotta tell you this one thing. When I was at Holyhill, I was with this guy for a while, and one thing led to another, and we ended up having sex, and neither of us meant for it to happen, but I got pregnant.”

“Whoa,” I say. “Really?”

“Really,” she says, shuddering at the memory. “And there was no way I could have a baby, so I decided — not to. I got a friend to take me to the doctor and I didn’t even tell Tess or my mom. But then one way or another, someone found out, and before I knew it, everyone had heard
everything.
”

“Oh, my God,” I say, trying to keep my mouth from hanging open. “That must have been awful.”

“I think you know exactly how awful it was, even though, you know”— she takes a long drag —“even though that wasn’t your situation. Anyway, I guess what I’m trying to say is — two things. One, there’s, like, a high-school line in the sand between girls who have had sex, gay or straight, and girls who haven’t. And the girls who haven’t want to know
everything,
and that’s why they talk about you the way they do, like, incessantly. Two, the things that feel like the biggest deal ever in high school — no one knows about them after you leave, which is awesome, escaping the gossip and everything. But the thing is, once you escape, you don’t have the people who knew how it changed you to go through whatever you went through, either. Do you kind of know what I’m saying?”

“I think so,” I say, trying to keep up. “I mean — what exactly are you saying?”

“I’m saying that girl in there, she’s your
girl.
She’s good people. She prays for you every night, and she’s always going to know about these things that happened to you, the things that made you who you are. You aren’t going to have a lot of people in your grown-up life who knew you when you were just a teenage dirtbag. I know you’re anxious to get the hell out of here. But don’t fast-forward your life away, and even though you have every right to be pissed off right now, don’t destroy all the reasons to ever come back. And if you don’t have your best girls, you don’t have shit. Do you kind of know what I’m saying now?”

“Yeah.” I nod more confidently. “Do you mind if we go in now? It’s cold as tits out here.”

She laughs. “I’m right behind you.”

“Ada, you’re —” I hug her awkwardly when we get back into the living room. “I don’t know. You’re really cool. Thanks for — sharing that with me.”

“You’re gonna be all right,” she says, mussing my hair. I part ways with Ada and climb upstairs in pursuit of another sister.

I hear her and Roy Orbison in her room; when I peer through the cracked-open door, her back is to me as she gracefully lifts her arms in sweeping arcs, a free weight in each hand. The song, “Dream Baby,” strikes me as a little doleful for a workout, but that’s Tess, ever her own disciple of paradox. Gingerly, I knock, wanting to startle her as little as possible. She jumps, shrieks, drops a weight, and turns around. Her face cycles through surprise, confusion, embarrassment, and finally something like relief as she sees me standing in her doorway.

“Tessie! What in the name of the Lord’s tarnation was that?” Darlene’s voice intrudes from the master bedroom.

“I just dropped a free weight — don’t worry,” Tess calls back. Under her breath, she continues, “Keep your panties together, spaz.”

I muffle a giggle. “Hi.”

“Hi,” she says. “I thought I heard your voice there, but then it disappeared.”

“Ada and me were out in the gazebo for a second.”

She sits down on her bed and takes a sip of water. “Ah. Was she telling you all about her fabulous New York life and chasing men with guitars and industry parties? Talking about how much cooler her life is in New York is kind of her MO this decade.”

“I mean, it does sound pretty sick,” I admit. “So you’re —sweating to the oldies?”

She smiles bashfully. “I want Michelle Obama arms.”

“Dude, that woman is a grade-A badass,” I say.

“No joke,” she says. “So what’s up with you?”

“You know, the usual,” I say. “Moving, shaking, balling. No big deal.”

She laughs at me in this way that I know she’s laughing
at
me. “You’re so full of it.”

“You could say that.” I take a step back and flop cross-legged on the floor, leaning back on the door until it clicks shut.

She looks at me. “Ez, what’s up?”

“I’m on my way to Rowie’s. I needed a pit stop for courage.”

“Gotcha.” She nods, sniffing the air. “Have you been smoking? You smell like Mystic Lake.”

“You can blame Carrie Bradshaw down there for that,” I say, jerking a thumb toward where I last saw Ada. “She was trying to, like, tell me about life and I think it kind of stressed her out.”

“I knew she was smoking again. It’s her fault I hate it when Marcy smokes; it just reminds me of all the fights between her and Darlene that I had to mediate when I was little and Ada was in high school.” Tess sighs. “So you’re going to talk to Rowie?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I mean, if she’ll let me.”

“I wanted to tell you,” she says. “I don’t know why, but I wanted to tell you that I sort of — I sort of always knew you were into her.”

“What?” I say, alarmed. “What do you mean, always?”

“Do you remember the time last summer when we stole the wine from my parents and went out to the gazebo and you told us you like girls?”

“Hazily,” I say.

“You all thought I was asleep later on,” she remembers, “and I was totally incapable of moving or talking, but I wasn’t actually asleep. And the last thing I remember before I actually did pass out was you saying this one thing over and over, going,
Rohini, married to the moon, Rohini, married to the moon.
”

“Really?” I ask. “I don’t even remember saying that out loud then.”

“Yeah. You’re not as good at keeping a secret as you think you are.”

“Don’t tell anyone,” I say, giving her a good-natured shove. “Yo, did she write that op-ed in the
West Wind
or what?”

She smiles. “Come on, do you really need to ask?”

“I knew it.” I say. “It probably wasn’t as obvious to everyone else as it was to us. But the massive vocabulary and intimate knowledge of 4H kind of gave her away.”

“Yeah, figures,” she says. “I wonder what made her do it.”

I peer at her. “All right, since we’re making confessions, there’s something I’ve always wondered.”

“Shoot.”

“Why did you stop being friends with Mary Ashley and start being friends with us?”

“Hmm.” She extends one leg and pulls at her toes, stretching. “I guess it’s like this. I used to think that Mary Ashley and all them — I used to think that they spent so much time doing church stuff because they really cared about finding the truth. And I studied the Bible because I did too, because I liked to study and I wanted answers. About, like, how we’re supposed to be. But hearing them say that it’s somehow wrong to be gay, that it’s dangerous or something, it just didn’t sit right with me. When I started hanging out and talking to you guys, for the first time I realized there were other people who had a lot of questions about what we’re taught to believe when it comes to sex and stuff. And that you guys were looking for the truth too, but you were looking for it through art, not religion. Then when you came out to us, and when I saw what you went through at school after people found out, I realized — I realized that there is no Christian way you can reject gay people, and that it’s just not possible if you love a gay person. Which I do.” She smiles, taking a breath. “Look, you guys taught me that we all have to think for ourselves and decide what we think is right. And I think love is love, and love is good. God made love. So love who you want. I do.”

“It’s weird,” I say, “how I feel like the time you started to question your faith for the first time sort of coincided with my deciding I had faith for the first time. I think I do believe in God. Not a Jewish god, or a Christian god, but just some being out there somewhere who knows more than I do, an x-factor in how life plays itself out. You know?”

“I mean, just think of it this way,” she says, raising her palms up flat like the Bird Girl. “The foundation under the three major world religions, all it is is a really good book. I’m not saying all word nerds have to believe in God, but if you believe language is sacred in some way — well, it’s not that much of a stretch.”

“You are the best possible combination of Jesus freak and word nerd.” I grin at her. “And a good saleswoman, too.”

“I know.”

“I gotta split, girl,” I say, checking the time on my phone: 10:18. “I’ve got a reconciliation to make.”

“‘God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation,’” Tess quotes. “Second Corinthians five-nineteen.”

“It still freaks me out how you can do that on command,” I say. “But it’s beautiful when you do.” I peck her on the cheek and pull on my coat. “Later, gator.”