Three Sisters (4 page)

“Agreed,” Liz said, “but not old enough to be really interesting.”

“Oh,” Karen said.

“Still,” Tobi said. “Old enough for Karen.”

Stand-up comedy, with her as the straight woman.

“David,” she said now, “do you realize we’ve been going around together for almost two years?”

“Looooong time.” He twisted harder and the scale pinged ominously.

“David. I want to ask you something. What kind of person do you think I am?”

“You’re okay.”

“Many thanks.”

“Well, what do you want me to say?”

“It isn’t what I want you to say, Davey. The point is, what do you want to say?”

“You’re okay.”

“Thanks, oh thanks. You, too.”

She wandered into the living room. There was a dry cleaning store across the street, a car wash, a pizza place. A man passed on a three-wheel bike. He stopped at a trash can, picked out two empty soda bottles, stashed them into a wire basket with other empties.

In the kitchen David was still Working away at the scale. She said, “You’re not afraid of breaking it?”

“Have some faith, will you, Karen?”

“David, not to be mean about it, but you always break things. Remember that clock you were going to fix—”

“It was beyond repair, Karen. Nobody could have fixed it.”

“- and your mother’s toaster which, you told me, she ended up throwing out—”

“That is not very friendly to remind me of that.”

“- and that little TV—”

“It was an old piece of junk. I thought I could resurrect it as a gift to my father.”

“Your intentions are good. Where’s Eggbert? You didn’t break him, did you?”

David looked at her over the scale. “Eggbert?”

“Disaster! You’ve forgotten already?”

They were both doing the Health and Family Life unit this quarter. In the interests of teaching his class “what it means to be responsible for another soul,” Mr. Albright had assigned each student the task of carrying around either an uncooked egg or a goldfish for two weeks. “Just think of that egg as your child. I want to see your child in school with you. If you want to leave your child, you have to get a baby-sitter. When you sit down to eat lunch, you must know where your child is and, in the case of those who choose a goldfish, you better make sure your child gets to eat properly.”

“The egg,” Karen said. “Eggbert. Your favorite kid, Davey. The friend of my kid, Gladys Goldfish.”

“Karen, you’re worrying a lot today.” He pointed to the cupboard where Eggbert was sitting next to a heap of dirty dishes.

“Don’t leave poor Eggbert there. He might get broken.”

David sighed. “Say break or broken once more, go ahead, I dare you.”

“Break. Broken. Brokest.” She leaped up as he dived for her.

“You’re not going to get away with this, Freed.” “Don’t break anything,” she yelled as they galloped around the furniture. He caught her in the corner between the couch and the TV. “Ah … uh. … oh … David. Davey! You’re breaking my ribs.” He didn’t want to let go. Hugs and hands. And he was a lot stronger than she, although she didn’t just limply let him do anything he wanted. Which, lately, was more and more. “Sex is natural,” he’d informed her. “Haven’t you heard the news? It’s wrong to stifle your basic biology.”

She hadn’t known what to say to him. She’d talked to Liz about it, not quite coming out with it, picking her way delicately around the subject, as if it were a bomb that might go off in her face. But Liz knew. “Look, Karen,” she said, “don’t let him talk you into anything. I tell you that from personal experience. From where I am now, I can see I picked the wrong person and the wrong time. It was—not good. But even if it had been the right person and the right time—no, I don’t think fifteen is exactly the right time for anyone. So think about it, Karen.” She had. She did. And she had come to some conclusions. “I love you a lot as a friend,” she said now, holding Davey’s hands.

“That’s great. I love you a lot, too.” “But … ah … don’t take this wrong; there’s something missing.”

“Hey, hold it! I’m all here. Nothing missing. Look.” “Quit that, Davey. I don’t mean missing in you.” “You’ve got something wrong with you?” “Maybe so.” A disturbing thought. “Something’s

missing in my feelings—do you know what I mean?”

He puffed up his lips, shook his head clownishly. “What is this missing mysterious matter?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “because I’ve never had it.”

“Then maybe whatever is missing is not, in fact, missing. Maybe everything is where it’s supposed to be. Me, boy. You, girl.”

Karen smiled automatically. Davey was making a joke of it, but she was sure, she was absolutely positive that something was missing between them, some chemistry—yes, some mysterious matter. And if it weren’t missing, if it were there, then she would know it and recognize it.

Seven

Sunday morning, Karen’s mother was frazzled, at least as frazzled as she ever got which, on a scale of ten, was about a four. “Your grandmother’s coming over,” she announced, lighting a cigarette.

“Yeah, Ma, it’s Sunday.”

“Well, what are we going to feed her?”

“You say that every Sunday.”

“Every Sunday it’s a problem.”

“Food will do fine,” Karen’s father said.

“Is that a dentist joke, Arnie? I was thinking meatballs, or—” She looked in the freezer. “I could heat up that casserole?”

“Meatballs,” Karen said. “Garlic bread, salad.”

“Good.” Her mother’s relief didn’t last long. “This house is a mess. I didn’t have a chance to do a thing all week. You’re not going out, are you?”

“The house looks okay to me,” Karen said.

“Librarians are cleaner,” her mother said. A librarian joke.

The minute they heard housecleaning, Liz and

38’

Tobi both disappeared. “I promised Scott… .” Liz jiggled her car keys.

And Tobi, in gray sweats and a white headband, said, “I’ll join the fun when I get back,” and jogged out the front door.

Karen felt surly at not being able to pull her own disappearing act. The phone rang. She took it in the kitchen. Maybe it was Marisa with some wonderful plan to rescue her from being the household drudge. “Hello.”

“Dr. Freed?” a male voice asked. Yes, you idiot, sure, this is Dr. Freed. “Dad,” she called. He picked up the phone upstairs.

“Arnie Freed speaking.”

“Dr. Freed? Dr. Freed, I have a terrible toothache.”

“How bad is it?”

“I didn’t sleep all night.”

Karen hung up. She knew the rest of the conversation. Did you try aspirin? Yes, Doctor. It didn’t help? No, Doctor. Well, if you feel that bad, why don’t you meet me in the office in half an hour?

Her mother said that her father had to be the only dentist in the United States without an answering service. No buffer. Nothing standing between him and his patients. They bleated and he ran. Karen couldn’t imagine being that devoted to puffy gums, putrid mouths, and rotting teeth.

While her mother washed the kitchen floor, Karen sorted through the pile of stuff in the front hall. The closet there was a catchall for everybody’s everything. “What a mess,” Karen complained, walking through the kitchen with an armload of jackets to hang up in the back entry way.

“It’s no more fun for me than for you.” Her mother was bent over the mop, wringing it out in a bucket.

“At least you’re used to it.”

“What makes you think that?”

“It’s your job, isn’t it?”

“I thought being a librarian was my job. Or do you believe in sex-associated cleaning genes?”

“Well, I never see Dad do this.”

“That’s because he has office hours,” her mother said, sitting back on her heels and lighting another cigarette. She puffed away, frowning. “I think that’s the excuse, anyway.”

When they were finally done, Karen took a couple of creamsicles from the freezer. She licked the frozen orange coat. “Reward food, Mom, don’t make faces like that.”

“Sweet stuff. Ruins your appetite.”

“You’d like it, too, if you didn’t smoke.”

Once, Karen had gone across town to visit her mother at work. Elbert Mingus Junior High. “Where’s the library?” A kid pointed indifferently. Karen went up worn stairs, down a wide, green-walled corridor. A display case with book jackets, a sign on the door. COME IN AND DON’T BE QUIET. The library was buzzing, kids all over the place. Her mother stood with her arms crossed, listening to a small, dark boy in a striped T-shirt. She wore a full skirt, a red silk blouse, earrings, stockings. She seemed to be somebody Karen didn’t know. Her mother put her hand on the boy’s shoulder; they walked over to a bookshelf. Three girls hurried up to her. “Mrs. Freed! Mrs. Freed, you gotta help us.

We’re desperate.” They like her, Karen thought. For some reason it was shocking.

She wandered into her mother’s study, a small, narrow room off the kitchen. The desk was snowed under with books and papers. This was where her mother did science book reviews for some magazine that only other librarians read. Karen could read the reviews only after they were published. Her mother’s other writing was off limits because it was unpublished. She had written a story for little kids, “Don’t Stop That Music,” that she kept sending around to publishers and getting back in the mail.

Karen peeled the paper off the second creamsicle. Once her mother had said to her, “You know what my life wishes are for you, darling? That you find somebody good to share your life with and that you have work that you love. Then you’ll be one of the lucky ones.”

“Like you?” Karen had said. . Her mother had hesitated, then nodded. “Like me.”

Karen remembered that hesitation. Sometimes she heard her parents fighting behind their closed bedroom door. Then she wondered about the things she and her sisters said about their parents. That they loved each other so exclusively, that they were neurotically dependent on each other. It was exciting to talk that way, but was it true?

“I wonder where Tobi is,” her mother said, sitting down at the desk. “She couldn’t be jogging all this time?”

At once, Karen imagined Tobi with the man in the photo, jogging by the reservoir, side by side, his

bow legs churning, Tobi’s heels kicking up. She saw this so vividly. She said, “Yes. She is!”

The hall door slammed. “Tobi?” her mother called.

“Me,” Liz answered. “Want some help?” she said, looking in. Scott hovered behind Liz. Over her shoulder, he waved to Karen.

Karen dropped the creamsicle sticks into the wastebasket, swiped at her mouth. Was she smeared orange? She hunched over to hide her stained sweat shirt.

“Your timing is great,” her mother said to Liz. “Karen and I did it all. But if you want to sign up for next week—”

Liz was rosy; all her freckles stood out, the way they did when she’d just come out of the shower. “We took a ride,” she said. “It’s beautiful out.”

“We went to see the house I’m working on,” Scott said.

“The one Scott designed,” Liz said.

“No, no, no. Don’t give your mother the wrong idea. I did the drawings, but it’s nothing complicated. I’m no architect.”

“You could be,” Liz said.

Scott looked from Liz to Karen to her mother, the same tender glance all around. “Listen to her,” he said, putting his chin on Liz’s head. They went out again, their arms around each other, and Karen and her mother heard Scott saying, “Come on, give me a little kiss!”

“There,” Karen’s mother murmured, “is a man who likes women.”

Mom?” Tobi said, coming into the kitchen, and bumped into Karen, as if she didn’t see her standing right there with a handful of silverware. Was Tobi nervous? “I want you to meet someone, Mom,” she said, and there he was, the man from the photograph, towering over Tobi, big and burly in a flannel shirt.

“This is Jason.” Black eyes, a brushy, flowing mustache, and thick, black hair, long hair, down to his shoulders. And—aha, Karen had been right, bow legs.

“Pleased to meet you, Tobi’s mom.” He should have had a deep, resonating voice to go with the rest of him; instead it was light, smooth, almost a boy’s voice. “I’d like to call you something else—and, really, not Mrs. Freed.”

“Well … the name is Sylvia.”

“I’m Karen.” Not that anybody asked. Jason looked at her, looked down at her. Then his hand, a real bear paw, outstretched; a brief touch, and he

returned the full force of his eyes to her” mother. Ah, so. For him, she didn’t count.

“Jason teaches at the college,” Tobi said. “But we met jogging.”

“At the reservoir,” Karen said, remembering her “vision.”

“What?” Tobi looked at her, frowning.

“You were jogging at the reservoir.”

“You just met today?” her mother said.

They were all talking at once. From above them, Jason laughed. “No,” Tobi said, “we didn’t just meet today. Where’d you get that idea?” They’d known each other quite a while, she said. “I’m in one of Jason’s classes.” But they only got to talking as people, not teacher-student, one day when they were both jogging. “Around the rose gardens,” she said. There went Karen’s vision.

“So I guess it’s, oh,-two months now we’ve been seeing each other.”

“Really,” her mother said. “Two months?” She didn’t like that. “That’s a long time, Tobi…” Her voice trailed off. Fill in the end of the sentence. … a long time for you to be seeing someone without your family knowing about it.

“Mmm,” Tobi said, sitting down and peeling an orange.

“How long have you been teaching, Jason?” her mother asked.

“Ten years, Sylvia.”

“Ah. And is that all you’ve ever done?” . She was fishing, wanting to know how old he was. Karen wondered the same thing. He looked nearly as old as her father; his neck was brown and crinkled.

Jason put a cigarette between his lips—the original Marlboro man. “Mind if I smoke?” Surprise! That light boy voice again.

Tobi got up, threw the orange peel into the garbage. “Mom’s a smokestack, herself.”

“Before I taught, Sylvia, I bummed around a bit, worked as a gaudy dancer on the railroads, picked up work here and there, enough to keep going as an artist, enough to keep my family together.”

“Family?” her mother said.

“Jason’s staying for dinner,” Tobi said. “Okay?” She leaned against him, a taut stick leaning against a tree, and in her eyes, in her glance upward, there was something that turned their mother’s nose faintly blue at the wings.