The Almost Archer Sisters (16 page)

“Well then, Peachy, try not to do anything stupid. You know how I feel about retaliation.”

“I won’t,” I said, lying.

“Don’t match hate with hatefulness.”

“Okay.”

“I love you a lot. But I love both my girls.”

“I love you too, but I could do without the last part.”

“Not me,” he said. “Not ever.”

We said goodbye and I started up the convertible. The border guard waved me out of the lot and gave me an aggressive thumbs-up, which felt corny and typical. I nodded. Until then, Americans had always killed me with those sentiments; their thumbs-up, their pats on the back, their way-to-gos, their you-can-do-its, their just-say-nos, a country of slogans to our footnotes.

B
EYOND THE FANTASIES
, beyond the daydreams and distractions, I’d thought of it, of leaving Beau and the boys, of never coming back. But where do you put those thoughts? Whom do you tell, I wondered, as the stewardess carefully pointed out all my new exits on the plane. Mothers meeting in parks don’t talk about that while their precious kids play a few feet away on the monkey bars. I’ve never completely admitted to Beth how tyrannical
constant
togetherness sometimes felt to me, in part because I thought there was something wrong with me. Also, my marriage and kids were the only things that truly separated me from Beth, made me different, and at times, better than her, I thought. And I’d never heard any woman admit that maybe it was all a big mistake, that the marriage and kid thing was highly overrated and that the idea of never being alone again, pretty much as long as you live, was too horrific to allow yourself to contemplate, even when you actually were alone. Especially then. But because I was leaving
the boys and men behind, and planned to do some terrible things, I thought I should be more afraid. Feel more ashamed.

It had been a morning of radical firsts: my first adultery, my first airplane ride, my first time away from the boys, let alone Lou, Beau, and the farm. But it was also the first time in almost ten years that I found myself completely alone, and I hated to admit this to anyone, let alone myself, after that morning, but sitting there, getting strapped in and sucked back in my seat upon ascent, I felt a bit wonderful. I never thought I was built for anything like abandon. But my constant vigilance was born less of altruism than of selfishness. I’d never left my boys before because I couldn’t contemplate what would happen to them if
I
died. Sam’s illness had bred a selfish morbidity in me; I pondered rueful, shocking thoughts. Who would take care of them? Naturally, Beau and Lou. But how would that go, all those men and all that testosterone under one roof? Jake and Sam were about the same age Beth and I were when Nell killed herself, so I’ve often fantasized about how much of me Jake would remember. Would it be as little as I remember of my mother? By virtue of being firstborn, Sam stored more of me in him as Beth had of our mother—something that had always made me envious. She and Nell had taken trips alone to the city. Nell taught Beth how to thread the sewing machine, how to roller-skate backward on the cement floor in the carport, and how to play “Merry Men” on the guitar. Beth got to have those memories even though I’d have appreciated them more. Yes, I was too young to learn these things, but I was left with so few memories of Nell mothering me, Nell loving me, that it was as though she had only ever existed in that brief watery home-movie reel that we had played and replayed.

As the plane hit its highest altitude and straightened up, I looked out the window at the checkerboard of farms stretching as far as I could see. Who knew there were still so many of us living so far apart from one another. Though we didn’t really count as farmers.
Maybe we should have made a better go at growing things instead of shaving off bits and pieces of the farm to afford to live on a farm that was no longer a farm. The last few acres on the other side of the river were the next to go, the offer from the builders too lucrative, and Sam’s operation in Detroit too expensive, to turn down. Lou loathed the idea of having neighbors, but maybe they’d be good for us. Maybe being isolated and unaccountable was our problem. Maybe if there had been neighbors other than the Rosarios, I would have married someone else, one of the subdivision boys, and not Beau. Or had I stayed in school, maybe I wouldn’t have married at all. I would have fallen in love with my career.

Instead, at twenty-eight, I had developed deep canyons between my eyebrows from worrying about people I couldn’t love enough, especially Beau, a man I married, truly and honestly, because my sister didn’t. And as ludicrous as it is, I kept the baby, went ahead with the whole shebang because an abortion would have made me appear to be copying Beth. My decision expressed nothing political, or maternal. I was merely avoiding embarrassment, the way a cat quickly, shyly, rights itself, as though it meant to roll off a high shelf while sleeping. Then I sealed the decision with Jake, because, I mean, who had two by accident? Asshole, I know. And even after Jake, I could have gone back to school and finished my degree. But aside from the work of raising kids, my career bubble burst after my internship in special ed. The day I snuck a peek at that assessment by the doctoral students, then drove home in tears, was the day I found Beau’s legs poking out from under Lou’s Jeep.

“You’re not my father. What have you done with my father?” I said, holding Beau’s ankles. Even though we often found him trailing Lou like a lanky shadow, I was genuinely happy to see Beau that day. A kind face after bad news.

“Peachy! Heyyy. Christ, we haven’t seen you in a long time.”

“What do you mean ‘we.’ You live here now?”

I embarrassed him. It was obvious to everyone that Beau stuck around because his stepdad was a merciless bully. Lou collected the indigent and upset like other people collected stamps. Some who came to the Sunday men’s meeting stuck around to help repair a fence or patch a roof. Others, like Beau, pulled up to chat while Lou cut hair in the carport if it was a nice day and they were only looking for a trim.

“Nah. Just working on the timer. It’s a beautiful machine, nice lines. Lou’s thinking of painting it dark blue. Hey, Lou’s gonna set me up with some work over at the co-op, fixing tractors and helping out at the oil field near Harrow. Can you believe it? Oil in Essex County. I told Lou we should stick a pipe by the willow and see what’s under that stump. You never know.”

“You never know. Where’s Lou?”

Beau told me he took one of the bachelor brothers’ trucks to Windsor to buy plastic piping for the new salon sink. Then he went on for a half an hour—while wiping his hands and putting away Lou’s tools in drawers and jars I had never noticed before— talking about the price of gas, the fact that our high school music teacher had a daughter who was gay, some bla-de-blah about his stupid sister Lucy’s stupid wedding and how it had cost twice as much as she said it would cost and how pissed his stepdad was and why should he pay for it if she wasn’t his blood kid and why hadn’t I been there (wasn’t invited), and in the middle of all that he asked about Beth. I said she was great, seeing some stockbroker, flying to Europe, meeting the rich and famous. Beau’s expression didn’t drop or change when he said, “That’s cool for Beth, I always figured her for a gold digger.”

“You look really great, Beau,” I blurted out.

“Oh. Thanks!” His grin did a slow spill across his face.

“I mean it,” I said, plucking the middle of his shirt like a harp. Rejection had made me cocky. Driving home that afternoon, I had come to the conclusion that I was going to quit social work
and maybe go into teaching. By the time I had passed through Tecumseh, I had quit teaching and I was thinking about farming. By Puce, I had quit farming and upon approaching Belle River, I was learning how to cut hair, rewriting the sign to say
CHEZ PEACHY, PLUS LOU
. But when I saw Beau’s wide-open face, I can’t help but imagine that I had subconsciously landed on motherhood, because I now know I had been violently ovulating.

I dropped my knapsack on the garage floor.

Beau looked momentarily frightened.

“Do you want a beer?” he asked. “Lou doesn’t mind if I keep cold ones for me in the little fridge out here. Plus, he likes to have drinks around for you and Beth.”

“I’m aware of that, Beau. I live here. Often, I buy the beer myself.”

“I know. I know. But we never see you anymore. I’m just saying,” he said, still grinning from my compliment.

I followed him into the house. We sat across from each other on the vinyl chairs and drank our beers kind of quickly, both of us nodding at each other and grinning into uneasy silences. I mentioned the new countertop. Beau said it was a bitch to put in. Three guys to lift it. No idea how heavy granite was. I let out a burp. He laughed and cracked open two more beers, placing mine gently in front of me as if he dared me one more. Out of the corner of my eye something tiny and dark broke our game and bolted across the kitchen floor.

“What was that?” I screamed.

“That’s that mouse, and by a mouse, I mean
a
mouse. There is
one
in this house. Lou’s been trying to get rid of that fucker all day. Hand me that, Peach,” he said, pointing to an empty juice bottle on the table.

“This?”

“Yup. Mouth’s wide enough. Stand back.” He got on his hands and knees, his top half disappearing under the sink. The stillness
of his hips belied the bumpy activity going on behind the rusty pipes.

“I got it!”
he hollered, his butt collapsing onto his heels, hands quickly capping the mouse inside. “Oh my God, I
got
it! Whooo!”

I peered over Beau’s shoulder. The tiny mouse was trying to scurry up the glass but kept losing its grip in the leftover dreck.

I screamed again.

“Oh God, Beau. That was impressive. Let’s take it down to the riv—”

“Are you kidding me? Lou tried that. No way. It’ll just come back. I gotta kill it.”

With that dismissal, Beau covered the top of the bottle with his wide palm. He began to shake it, slow at first, but then his arm became a blur, like a graffiti artist readying a spray can. He kept saying, “I’m sorry,” over and over again, to whom or what, I didn’t know, but it was a horrible minute and a half. I covered my eyes while the mouse made tiny thumping sounds. After Beau deemed it dead, he emptied the contents into the garbage under the sink and rinsed out the bottle.

“Whoo. Sorry, Peach, there was just no turning back. I put myself in a really difficult position there. Either it suffocated in the bottle, or I killed it quick. But that was fucking sick, you think?” He shuddered, shaking his wild deed out of his arm. I thought of the implications of having sex with a man who would do what he had just done, the brutality of which was hard to process, but was terrifically, disgustingly sexy.

“Sorry, Peachy, that was weird.”

“Yup.”

“Whew. All right, where were we?”

He grinned the grin of a guy who was completely comfortable in his own skin. He was different than the scholars and complainers I’d been surrounded by in university, with their brainy ideas about
love. Beau walked over to where I sat, my head tilted up at him, my legs slightly splayed on a kitchen chair. This time I didn’t, couldn’t, stop him from doing what I knew he wanted to do. He got down on his knees in front of me. He clinically separated my thighs and wiggled his skinny torso between my legs, putting his face a few inches from mine. I smiled at him. He smiled at me and laughed. Then he tunneled his hands up the front of my T-shirt and placed them heavily upon both breasts. I put my hands on the top of his hair, which felt dry and wiry.

“I am totally freaked out right now, Peachy. Totally freaked out.”

“Me too. That mouse killing was weird.”

“No. I’m freaked out because I thought about doing this. A lot. And I was thinking exactly this when I saw you today.”

“Thinking exactly what?” I teased, fiddling with his ears because I only had his head to play with.

“Thinking I’d like to fuck your brains out on Lou’s new countertop.”

“You think?” I laughed.

“Oh shit, though. I just remembered something. Fuck. I just started seeing someone, Peachy,” he said, collapsing back down on his heels. He looked to the floor and then up at me like he was praying into my face.

“Who?” Not picked again, I thought. This after he’d placed his callused hands on my tiny tits.

“Janey Waterman.”

“The dog washer from the vet’s?”

“Yeah, but she’s training to be a vet.”

“Sounds exciting.”

“She’s gonna take it really hard,” he said, thoughtfully rubbing a nonexistent beard.

“Take what hard?”

“That it’s over.”

“It is?”

“It is.”

“I guess so.”

“What do you mean, ‘I guess so.’” He inched back up between my legs and began messing with the back of my bra under my T-shirt.

“Well, I mean, Beau, I wouldn’t want you to break up with someone if you didn’t want to.” Pick me. Pick me, I thought. I helpfully pulled my loosened bra through the arms of my T-shirt and threw it over his head.

“But I want to break up with her.”

“And then what.”

“And then you can be my girlfriend.”

The safety pin holding up the zipper of my jeans was giving him some trouble. Had I known this would happen, I would have worn my new black cords, with my tight, blue-and-white-striped boatneck top.

“Your girlfriend. Says who?”

“Says me, man.”

“What about Beth?” I stood up so he could tug my jeans down, putting my hand on his shoulder to stay steady.

“Beth who? That was high school, Peachy, Jesus. I don’t think about her. I don’t even like her. She dates dickheads.”

“Would you still fuck her?” I lost my balance and fell back onto the chair. I noticed that my bra had landed near the dog bowl.

“What a stupid question. No. I don’t want to fuck her. Clearly, it’s you I’m wanting to fuck.”

“And then what.” Me. Pick me.

“Well, then we’ll … do some more fucking. And then maybe a bit more. Man, this is great. You have no idea.”