The Life and Death of Sophie Stark (5 page)

M
Y GRANDMA AND MY GRANDPA
loved each other, and when he died she cried for one whole day, my mom said, and then she went out and got a second job baking bread at the women’s prison. She was smart and fast, and soon she was promoted to line cook, then kitchen manager, and she was able to quit her first job at a factory that made wooden dishware, and she worked at the prison until she died. My mom and I visited her when I was four or five years old, before my sisters were born, and she made bread with a soft cheese baked inside it and I kept wondering what magic she used to get it in there. Another woman was staying with my grandma then, a lady named Elma who had been a prisoner. She had a big square body and a face that had seen a lot of sun, and I remember she taught me how to peel an orange in a spiral so you’re left with a bouncy, sweet-smelling snake. She also told me a story about her grandfather that I didn’t believe but that I loved. She said he was a sailor who was captured by pirates, and they were about to make him walk the plank when he made a special Masonic hand signal, and since they were Masons too, they not only let him go but taught him all their pirate secrets and codes and ways of avoiding the law. Elma had round
cheeks and deep wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, and when she smiled, I thought she looked like Mrs. Claus, and I told her that, and she laughed.

That night when my grandma was putting me to bed, I asked her what Elma had done to go to prison. My grandma didn’t believe in lying to children, so she told me that Elma’s husband used to beat her and her daughter, so one night Elma killed him. I was scared then—not because I thought Elma would kill us but because I was worried that the nice lady who I’d started to love the quick way little kids do was actually evil and I’d have to hate her.

“Is Elma a bad person?” I asked my grandma.

“What she did was bad,” she said. “But not as bad as letting somebody hurt you over and over and not doing anything about it.”

I knew she was talking about my dad, which wasn’t fair, because he was just a screwup who never hit anyone in his life. But I remembered this forever, how bad she thought Mom was for taking shit from him. And I thought of it the day I packed up my stuff while Sophie was editing and moved to a new apartment across town.

BURNELL COLLEGE MONGOOSE

Despite Flaws,
Marianne
Makes an Impression

R. Benjamin Martin, Class of 2005

Robbie

SOPHIE RAISED ME, KIND OF. WE RAISED EACH OTHER. OUR DAD
was dead, and our mom was just young and sad and indecisive, and one day she was into Amway and the next day she was into Jesus, and she was never that into us. Sophie taught me how to read and how to draw and how to crouch quietly in the grass behind the drugstore and spy on people, like teenagers making out and our third-grade teacher crying and once our mom looking at photos of a man we didn’t know with an expression we’d never seen before. I taught her how to boil a hot dog and clean a cut and talk to grown-ups to get out of being in trouble—she never got good at the last one, so a lot of times I had to do it for her.

That makes it sound like we were best friends, and we were, but also she did all kinds of things I didn’t understand. She was terrible at school—she didn’t care about pleasing the teachers, and she didn’t care about fitting in, and when she was in eighth grade, she started wearing the same men’s black button-down shirt as a dress every
single day, with a leather belt around the middle and boxer shorts underneath. The other kids called her “Crazy Emily”—she was still plain old Emily Buckley then, after our grandma—but she didn’t seem to care. I was in sixth grade then, and I’m embarrassed to admit I tried to pretend I didn’t know her; I even made fun of her when my friends did, though not as harshly and not when she was around to hear. It didn’t work—the school was small, and everybody already knew we were brother and sister. Even if they hadn’t, it was obvious: She and I had the same black hair and sharp faces, the same everything, except her eyes were even bigger than mine. So I tried to convince her to act more like a normal kid. It didn’t work, until the eighth grade when boys started throwing chocolate milk and mushy strawberries at her, and even then her only concession was buying some girls’ jeans.

In high school she started trying a lot of different things—one week she went running every morning wearing her crappy black sneakers and twisted her ankle so hard she limped for a month. After that she started smoking weed—I’d find her in her room red-eyed, petting the wall. Then she tried other drugs, ones I didn’t know. She started coming home covered in sweat, her pupils pinpricked, and once she drew tiny figures all over her bedspread in permanent ink, men and women with their faces all turned up like they were staring at the sun. She still didn’t have any friends at school, but there were rumors about her—about girls, about boys, about older men I was sure she’d never have anything to do with, as much as I could ever be sure about her. Twice she stayed out all night and wouldn’t tell me where she’d been. Once I caught her outside the drugstore begging for spare change.

When she was seventeen, she said she wasn’t going to college.
She said she was going to move to Chicago and draw portraits of people on the street for money. Maybe I should’ve let her do it. I don’t know if she was happy then, but she had this kind of drive in her, and maybe if I’d just let her go, it would’ve pushed her in the right direction. But a family has to have one practical person, and I wanted my sister to have a nice life. Also, even though she still embarrassed me at school, part of me was proud of her. I thought she was a genius, and I thought no one had seen it yet, and I wanted them to see.

So I convinced her to take the SAT, and then I found some colleges that didn’t seem to care that much how you scored on it. I filled out the application for her. I said I (Emily) was an avid artist and also president of the French club (which we didn’t have) and a volunteer at the senior center (it was true that she’d been a big hit on our high school’s trip there, because she’d been willing to sit silently and listen to the old people for hours). I said my goal in life was to help people through art. My sister’s only contribution was in the “nicknames” field, where she wrote “Sophie Stark.”

“I’m changing my name,” she said.

I asked her why.

She shrugged. “Do I look like an Emily to you?”

I had to admit that she didn’t. I sent her applications off, and in the spring she got into Drucker, a liberal-arts college in eastern Iowa, about a hundred miles from our town. Mom had a party with scented candles and hard cookies shaped like fish, and it was just the three of us plus a lady from her church, and then one day late in August my sister was gone, and there we were in the house by ourselves.

I still had two years of high school to get through. I tried on some different things, too: I started listening to a lot of punk music and wearing band T-shirts, and then I tried out for and managed to
get on the baseball team. Both of these worked out sort of okay—no one thought I was a loser, and I made a couple of new friends. But I didn’t get a girlfriend or become extremely cool, and I felt kind of cut loose, like as soon as I left school in the afternoon, I didn’t know what to do or how to be. I missed my sister. I kept starting a sentence in our silent house and realizing she wasn’t there to hear.

When I got into Drucker, it was obvious I’d go. I’d gotten into a couple of other schools, and I made a show on the phone with my sister of weighing my options, but all she said was, “You should probably come here,” so I did. I remembered how she’d been in high school, but I’d heard that college was supposed to change people—my friend Tyler’s brother had come back a Jehovah’s Witness—and I thought there was a chance Sophie had become cool. When I sent in my acceptance letter, I imagined her talking about me to a bunch of girls in black clothes, who played it cool because they were artists but who were all secretly excited to meet me.

But Sophie was even weirder in college than she had been in high school. She’d started wearing old-lady floral dresses that didn’t fit any better than the men’s shirt had, and it seemed like she wasn’t washing her hair. As far as I could tell, she had never taken more than one class in any given subject. She still had no friends. Every night she came to my room and sat on my bed for hours, not talking to me, just drawing stick figures in a notebook she had. Nothing I said about my classes seemed to interest her much—I was planning to declare premed, so I was taking mostly science—but she perked up when I mentioned Intro to Cinematography. This was an elective I’d picked because it wasn’t full, but soon it was my favorite—I’d always assumed that people who made movies just tried to make them look as much like real life as possible, but I was learning that
movies could make life look different, could make time go faster or slower, make the world seem flat or deep, put a woman in red far in the background and let her draw everyone’s eyes. Whenever I talked about that class, Sophie would listen really closely, and sometimes she’d write something down. It made me feel proud of myself, that I could teach her something for a change. Then, after a couple of weeks, she said, “I need a video camera.”

“For what?” I asked.

“I’m going to make a movie about Daniel,” she said.

Daniel Vollker was the guy my sister was in love with. He was on the basketball team and lived in an off-campus house full of jocky guys, and he looked like the star of a sci-fi movie about genetic engineering. He had a beautiful (though supposedly slightly crazy) girlfriend who was the vice president of the campus Christian fellowship, and he routinely hooked up with equally beautiful but less wholesome girls who then cried about him in campus bars and made him famous. He didn’t go for unconventional-looking women, and he didn’t move in the same circles as my sister, who as far as I could tell moved in no circles at all. The only reason he knew she existed, it turned out, was because she’d been following him around for weeks, even skipping her own classes so that she could go to his. And now she wanted to film him.

“Why?” I asked.

“I took a lot of pictures of him,” she explained. “But I want to show him moving.”

Sophie had gotten a little point-and-shoot camera for her fifteenth birthday, and she’d taken photos off and on since then. She’d taken one of me when we were both in high school that I still love—I’m sitting on our front steps eating an ice cream sandwich, and I
look more like myself than I’ve ever looked in any mirror, a little bit angry but a little bit hopeful, too, like I’m looking forward to not being mad. Now she was cutting most of the few classes she was actually enrolled in to take pictures. They were different from the ones I’d seen when we were kids—sometimes she’d take ten or twenty shots of a crowded quad or a person sitting in the corner of the student union, and she’d always just shrug when I asked about them, like she was trying an experiment she couldn’t or wouldn’t explain. But photography was a thing normal people did, unlike drawing people for spare change on the street, so I was happy to encourage it if I could. I was starting to worry that my sister and I were falling down a misfit hole we’d never climb out of.

“Just make sure you don’t break it,” I said. “We got a big lecture on how fragile they are.”

“Oh,” she said, “you’re coming. I don’t know how to work the camera by myself.”

Right away we ran into trouble. We spent a Saturday standing outside the big, dilapidated row house where Daniel lived, waiting for him to come out. It was October, not cold yet but getting there, with that gold pretty light that falls across the Midwest right before winter, and for a while I felt good, standing out there with my sister, showing her the few things I’d learned. But Daniel never came out, and the next day in English the guys who sat in the back made fun of me.

“I hear your sister’s a stalker,” said one.

That was not what either of us needed.

“Can’t you make a different movie?” I asked her.

“Why?” she asked.

“Daniel’s friends are starting to talk shit,” I said.

We were at her place for once, an apartment above a bar that she shared with a med student. Her kitchen was clean and organized, with a bowl of fruit on the table next to a loaf of her roommate’s homemade bread. Sophie’s food tastes had stalled out around age ten, and she kept all her own food—oatmeal packets and canned fruit and white bread and sugar—in her bedroom, which looked like a homeless person’s shopping cart, like if she didn’t keep everything she owned in a giant pile right next to her body, someone would steal it or throw it away. She cleared a space for herself amid all the papers and socks and candy wrappers on her bed and sat down.

“Are you worried about this because you want to hang out with those guys?” she asked me.

Sometimes I assumed that because Sophie didn’t care what was going on around her, she didn’t understand it either. I was always wrong.

“No,” I said. “I just— Why don’t you make a movie about someone who wants to have a movie made about them?”

Sophie cleared a space for me to sit, too. Her messy room looked and smelled like home, and I missed the years when I couldn’t sleep and she’d make a space for me on the floor next to her bed. Sometimes she was the one who couldn’t get to sleep; she had night terrors that made her howl in fear with her eyes wide open, and I was the only one who could comfort her. I’d put my two hands around her head and squeeze gently, like I was holding her brains together, and slowly she’d calm down and sleep.

“If you want to try and be friends with them,” she said, “you should go ahead. They have a lot of parties. They get a lot of girls.”

From someone else this could’ve been manipulative, but Sophie always meant what she said. And she was right—I did want parties
and girls. The closest I’d come to sex was a party senior year of high school when Tracy Schneider stuck her hand down my pants and stroked me until I was hard, then mysteriously lost interest and walked away. What I didn’t understand was why Sophie didn’t want the same things. She might not care about making friends, but she did care about Daniel. Sophie was weird, but I was old enough to know she wouldn’t be the first person to fake being normal in order to get laid.

“Maybe you should go to parties,” I said. “Talk to people. Talk to Daniel. That’s a better way of getting his attention than stalking him with a camera.”

Sophie got a crumpled look on her face then that I’d only seen a handful of times before.

“You think I don’t try,” she said, “but I try.”

She pulled her knees up to her chest and rested her head on them.

“When I first came here,” she went on, “I decided I was going to fit in. I got a haircut. I got a short skirt.”

I tried to imagine my sister dressing like the other girls. I tried to imagine her looking like them, her face all happy and nervous as she laughed with them on the way to class.

“And what happened?” I asked.

“It worked. I had girlfriends. I had these girls, and we went out for pizza together, and we went to the bars and tried to get older guys to buy us drinks, and afterward we talked about which guys were cute and which ones liked us. I even went home with a guy once, who I didn’t even like, just so I could tell the girls about it at breakfast the next morning.”

It almost made me jealous, my sister having a social life I knew nothing about.

“Where are they?” I asked. “How come you’re not still friends?”

Guys were yelling in the street outside the window. There was a football game that night, and the tailgates were starting.

“Two of the girls had a fight. Jenny and Carla. Carla wasn’t speaking to Jenny, and I met Jenny for coffee—that was something we used to do, meet each other for coffee, even though none of us liked it—and Jenny was crying because Carla wouldn’t talk to her. She said she kept thinking of things she wanted to tell Carla, just little things that only Carla would understand. She said the feeling of having no one to tell those things to was so terrible, and she said it like she knew I’d understand, but I’d never had a thing I’d wanted to tell any of them that badly. To me, hanging out together was like acting—putting on the right face, laughing at the right time. It was interesting, and I liked it in a way, but I didn’t need it like Jenny did. That’s when I knew that I could spend time with people but I was never really going to be friends with them the way they were with each other. And so I just stopped trying.”