The Bride of Catastrophe (43 page)

“The important thing is that we're together,” she said.

“That is
not
the important thing,” I said, through my teeth. “The important thing is…” but I couldn't think. Maybe nothing was very important. I felt the impulse that had just arisen—to tear all the veils and set my hand on something true—recede. What did it matter, after all, any of it? Nothing would change. We would all go on spinning outward, away from each other, each foolish hope failing, each desperate move leading to a worse consequence, whether or not Dolly and I saw the jellyfish in the Hartford Aquarium.

“You're right, of course,” I said. “It's just, I'm so sorry.” My voice, infuriatingly, was breaking. I tried to cover it with a laugh. “Oh, dear, why do these things always happen to us?” I said. The afternoon would shrink away; we would turn it into a neat anecdote that confirmed our sisterhood; we'd laugh to think what we must have looked like to those drivers who'd passed us. It would be funny one day, it would, and we both laughed dully in anticipation.

“If we could just get something to drink,” she said then, wearily—no one could accuse her of complaining. But the museum was closed, the woman had disappeared back into the building, there was nothing in any direction but the lees and swells of bulldozed earth. Thousands of cars sped out of the barren landscape now, heading, it seemed, nowhere, the bus among them. It picked up its passengers and took off again before we could brook the traffic to reach it. the driver staring stonily ahead while I tried to signal him, the passengers looking on mildly, full of their own thoughts. They had seen many more curious sights than this bedraggled woman, waving her arms on a street corner as if she thought she was drowning. We got the six o'clock bus and rode back to Frog Hollow in a silence broken only by Dolly's earnest expressions of gratitude for the wonderful afternoon she knew I'd meant her to have.

Five

L
EE HAD
made baked stuffed flounder for dinner. “Finally, a fish,” I said, but no one noticed the joke.

“If you'd called I'd have started it later,” Lee said as she spooned the gelatinous stuff onto our plates. “I've been working on it ever since I got home.” No doubt true, I thought—she was convinced that all foods needed to be chopped, marinated, and sauced until they were completely purified of any trace of their vulgar roots. She could make a vegetable terrine that tasted exactly like fish and a salmon pâté that tasted just like broccoli, and then there were the tomato roses or the pureed turnips or the veal birds. Usually I liked this, since it meant we spent hours in the kitchen together with only the simplest conversation, grinding garlic against sea salt, sifting cornmeal over a boiling pot—it was all abundant, fragrant, warm. Sex was nearly behind us—we didn't seem to need it anymore and were only moved that way when we'd been out in the straight world and remembered that for us making love was an act of rebellion. But the food, the food proved how lucky we were in each other's love.

“What's in the sauce?” I asked, thinking it looked like disintegrating cardboard.

“Shallots, in a cream reduction with a little vermouth,” she said, and I had a guilty flash of memory: Ma, getting Thanksgiving dinner with only that one stove burner working. “And paprika, and celery salt, and I put in a pinch of curry, I don't know if you can taste it.

“And it's the tamari-sesame dressing,” Lee continued, pushing the salad toward me. “Look at the cucumbers—I used that julienne blade.”

Dolly's good humor was running low and though she praised each bite, she only got through three or four before she excused herself, asking if we'd mind if she took a shower. This time tomorrow, I thought, she'd be on the way back to Wyoming. I was counting the hours.

“She's sort of sullen,” Lee said, as soon as we heard the shower.

My blood leapt—“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Look, she hardly ate a bite. She doesn't smile, she just sits there making little judgments. She has no spark,” she said, and went silent.

“She's depressed,” I said, standing up to clear, moving gently so as to keep my speech light. “Would you smile, if you were fourteen and your mother wouldn't recognize you and you had to move two thousand miles away from your family and all your friends so you could live in a godawful tract house with your lost, dazed father, and the mountains went up like a cliff to the west so you never saw the sun after one o'clock in the afternoon?”

And if your older sister, your one hope, was so inept she couldn't manage to take you an afternoon's outing, never mind saving you?
I thought.

“And what's your wattage, anyway?” I asked suddenly, and Lee gasped as if I'd struck her and started to cry.

“She's a guest in our home,” she said. “She ought to make some effort.” And then, as if she'd only just truly heard what I'd said, she sat down and wept in earnest. In my anger I'd jabbed her right in the big secret we were keeping from each other.

“Three bites, and I worked on it all afternoon.”

“It's not about dinner!” I roared, but I realized she'd been offering me an olive branch, a chance to pretend it
was
about dinner, and not about whatever it was I was desperate to get from her, that she didn't have to give. I heard my mother's ghost in my voice … and
that
I refused to accede to.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “It's just been such a bad day … and you made a wonderful dinner, and if only I'd called, everything would have been fine.”

“Accepted,” she said, turning both faucets on to fill the dishpan. She took care of me all day, every day—whether or not I needed it. I owed her gratitude at least. Slender though she was, she seemed like a pudgy boy, her shoulder blades moving like a pair of tiny, useless wings as she soaped the dishes and set them in the drainer. Then she went into the back room, where she was refinishing a chair. I ran my hand along the surface of the dining table, her last project; it was like satin, you could almost feel the grain. Wind, water, and Lee Schuyler, I thought—they all know how to wear the things they touch smooth.

Dolly came out in Lee's bathrobe and made for the refrigerator. “My stomach feels funny,” she said. “Do you have some ice cream or something?”

We never had ice cream.

“How about some cheese?” I asked. It was moldy but we could cut that part off.

“I know,” she said, “I'll eat that yogurt. I think that would help.”

“That's Lee's,” I said, wanting to bare my teeth and ask how the yogurt had changed since breakfast, when she'd found it so revolting. Spinning into a rage, I caught a dizzied glimpse of something—she meant to eat the yogurt now to make amends for her earlier refusal. She looked up at me in hurt surprise.

“For her lunch,” I said, “That's what she has for lunch—she's worried for her heart.”

“Well, can't she get some more?”

“Not before work,” I said piously. “Have some cheese.”

“It's all moldy,” Dolly said. “Don't you have cottage cheese, or cream cheese or something?”

“What is it, do you think food just grows in the refrigerator? Well, it doesn't. Someone has to go out and buy it, someone who
works
.” Someone who had spent hours making a special dinner that tasted awful to me, who wanted only one thing—my love, which I could not seem really to give her …

Dolly shot me a despising glance and quickly looked away. Her lip was quivering, and I saw the moment of her indecision give way to anger—“You're my
sister
and you won't give me a cup of yogurt out of your refrigerator!” she said. “All that time living out there and not once, not one time, did
you
call
me
, to ask how I was doing, to say you'd do anything to help, nothing,
NOTHING!
” A sob shook her, and she bent into herself, holding her own arms as if that were the best embrace she could hope for. “Abandon us all? When just a few thousand dollars would mean so much—for Sylvie and the baby at least—he's just a baby, he hasn't done anything wrong.”

She immersed herself in weeping, repeating “my sister, my sister” in sarcastic misery. If her mother was an implacable, avenging whirlwind, her father a wisp in the breeze, then, I stood
in loco parentis
. On this we had both, without thinking, agreed. Sylvie and I were the only ones who had so much as a job, and everyone knew Sylvie needed every dollar, while I lived in comfort and ease.

“One goddamned cup of yogurt,” she said again, and I grabbed it out of the refrigerator, ripped off the lid, and pushed it at her.

“Here,” I said, “have it, if you think a cup of yogurt is so important, eat it then!”

“I don't want it
now
,” she said, pushing it away and burying her head in her arms to cry so quietly, I could hear the faithful, exact strokes of Lee's sandpaper in the back room.

“No, I insist,
you
eat the yogurt.”

“I don't
want
it!” she roared, striking out at it as if it were a cup of hemlock, and it went flying across the room, spilling its pale pink contents in the most vibrant, painterly way. She waited for me to respond, and I thought that we were at the brink of the familiar, that I could almost feel my mother's presence. Ma would have raged at Dolly, or splashed a dishpan full of water down on the mess, or whatever would most completely electrify us. And afterward, we'd feel we'd witnessed an act of nature, been washed clean by a furious storm.

“I want to go home,” Dolly said. “I want so much to go home.”

“You'll be there tomorrow.” This was the cruelest thing I could have said. She didn't mean Wyoming of course, but our home, or the place we had tried to believe it had been, the beautiful farm on the hillside where the girls with their long hair cradled the little lambs in their arms, while in the valley below us, the evening lamps blinked on and the stars grew brighter in the sky. Why couldn't that place have existed, when we'd wanted it so badly, had worked so hard to make it real? She cried at the table as I sopped the yogurt off the floor, listening to Lee's sandpaper, thinking of that poor lost place, our home.

“I'll never be there again,” she said.

“And in fact, you were never there in the first place,” I snapped.

She looked at me as if I'd lost my mind, but I didn't care, so long as she didn't grab hold of me now and pull me down. It seemed possible to me that, with great effort, I might be able to shed my own meshugas—my family—accomplish this or that, keep out of debt, go to the supermarket without being fearful of the cashiers, love someone—all this might be in reach, but just barely, and not with Dolly holding on to my skirt.

Dolly took a deep breath and sat back in her chair. “But it's true,” she said. “I'll be home tomorrow.” She was giving up on me, and the minute I felt her grip loosen I was filled with regret.

“Dolly,” I said.

She waved a hand, sniffed, and even smiled a little. “I took pictures of the baby. Pop said he can't wait to see them. There's a store out there that develops them in an hour.”

Lee came in peeling her rubber gloves off like a surgeon and went to the sink to wash her hands.

“I think that was shellac I was stripping off there,” she said. “I closed off the back room.”

Her face was so closed against us, it seemed I'd need a can opener to reach her.

“What were you two arguing over?” she asked, when Dolly was tucked in and we got into bed.

“Yogurt, strawberry yogurt,” I said disgustedly. “Really, about the past and the future. The thing is that she can't bear to admit what's happened to her, that she needs her mother, that she made a mistake going with Pop, she can't bear to see it and the mistakes just snowball.” I talked on and on, about my family, all families, the human entropy by which each wrong turn leads you further toward the edge of life, generation after generation, until you're lost.

She laughed. “My little dramatist,” she said, with kind condescension, patting my hand. “Go to sleep, things will seem different in the morning.”

“Your little
what?
” I asked.

“Don't be offended,” she said, still smiling. “It's cute, I mean of course it gets on people's nerves, your intensity, you know—your way of thinking too much—but I think it's cute, it's part of why I love you.”

“Cute?” I said. Well, what if I roared from the depths of myself, and bit off her head? Because that was what I, cute little pie that I was, felt like doing just then. There was, I thought, a superciliousness to Lee's humility: a contortion of ego. Hers was all the larger for managing to appear so small. “I do not
think too much,”
I said, with Churchillian composure. “I am trying to figure my way out of a mire.”

“I know, sweetie,” she said. “I know it's hard for you.” The pity in her voice revealed to me a small and peculiarly simple landscape that I'd never glimpsed before—her view of me.

“How about a little back rub?” she asked me. “Or a cup of chamomile tea? You know how I like to indulge you.”

“
Talk
to me, then,” I said.

“Sweetie, there's no use examining everything the way you do,” she said. “This, too, will pass, as they say” (she faltered, afraid of misquoting). “No use crying over spilt milk,” she said, to make herself clearer. “You're still young, you like to be
philosophical, mystical
” (strange emphasis, as if these words were pornographic). “And that's fine, it's sweet, really, but—”

“But what?”

“Well, I guess I just forget how young you are,” she said, “You'll cool down, and it's refreshing, your being so, you know, naive. Let's go to sleep. I don't care about the yogurt. I just want you to be happy, that's all.”