Two Sisters: A Novel (11 page)

“I’m sure.”

Of course she believed her. Pia was always sure.

S
T
. J
OHN’S
C
EMETERY
—the multiacre sprawl of headstones and weeping statuary along Metropolitan Avenue, where mobster John Gotti is buried—was the liveliest part of Middle Village, Queens. According to Lidia Sullivant, that is. She never tired of reminding her husband and the rest of her family how much she’d rather be on the other side of the East River.

“Where the
living
live,” she often said.

One winter Saturday in their Middle Village row house, young Muriel heard her mother’s precise footfalls down the hardwood stairs. It was her favorite day. No school. No church. Her homework was already done. But the clipped sound of Lidia’s spiked heels coming toward the kitchen quickened her pulse. Even though it was lunchtime, she considered tossing her peanut butter sandwich in the trash.

“How soon can you get dressed up?”

“Me?”

Owen was sudsing a paintbrush at the sink. His back tensed at the sound of his wife’s voice. Through the kitchen window Muriel spotted her teenage brother, Logan, fussing with wires and sparks on the back porch. She thought,
Pia must be out somewhere with her friends
.

“Yes you, silly. Would you like to see a real Broadway show?”

As if waiting for the punch line, Muriel stared up at her mother and blinked. She took a big swig of milk and felt the painful descent of a wedged wad of peanut butter and bread. Wearing a steel-gray wool pantsuit and matching shoes with pointy toes and heels, Lidia stood with a fur-lined Burberry trench draped over her arm. “Well?” she said, impatiently. “Want to go or not?”

“Do I!”

Grabbing the remains of her sandwich, Muriel scrabbled up the stairs. Silently, Lidia took the newspaper off the kitchen table and waited for her daughter in the front room.

It was a cold December day. Mother and daughter hurried to the subway stop a few blocks away, red cheeked and chilly. Lidia carried her fancy shoes in a fancy tote. They took the M train to Wyckoff Avenue, then transferred to the L line, which rumbled aboveground through Queens before descending into the tunnel below the East River. Owen had been mistaken. It
wasn’t
a straight shot from Middle Village to midtown Manhattan. There were transfers and gum-splotted station platforms. The air belowground reeked of scummy water and human decay. Had driving through Times Square not been so atrocious and parking not so absurdly expensive, Lidia wouldn’t have dreamed of setting foot on a subway train. Why, one time the linoleum floor on the train was so filthy she was loath to step on it! More often than not a homeless man, smelling of death itself, lay slumped in a corner. Plus there were all those welfare queens with their litter of children. Clearly they spent their government handouts on fried food and drugs. Why else would they look so bloated and so frequently forget to use birth control?

Of course, if Lidia was with Owen, she would insist he drive her into the city, drop her off at the curb in front of wherever they were going, and park nearby no matter what the cost. It was only right, after all. He did force her to live in Queens. With Muriel, however, the trains were good enough. The last thing she needed was to worry about tipping every open palm in a Manhattan parking lot and finding the garage again when there were so many identical garages hidden in the bowels of every high-rise.

For Muriel, that frosty Saturday afternoon with her mother was the best day of her life. She couldn’t stop smiling. She loved everything about subways and trains—the way their rhythmic growl pummeled her chest, the side-to-side shimmy, the salty taste of grit in the underground air. All those interesting people with their braided hair and puffy jackets. To her, trains sounded determined, as if tracks were a mere suggestion of where a train might choose to go on its own. A subway car might loosen its own third rail and take off one day, not caring in the slightest who was onboard. Trains were the sound of freedom, of escape.

Beneath her best coat, Muriel wore a green velvet dress with satin trim. A gift from her grandmother Piacek Jula—Pia’s namesake. The dress was too young for her, the kind of overfussy dress a flower girl wears to a wedding, then never again, but Muriel wore it anyway because she knew it would please her mother. She also knew the next time she saw her
babcia
, her grandmother would ask, “How did it fit? Was it too tight?” Family members were always asking Muriel if her clothes were too tight. As if they didn’t have eyes in their very own heads.

Sitting on the hard plastic seat, with her shoulder touching her mother’s, Muriel felt utterly grown up in spite of her snug little-girl dress. They faced the window, rocking in tandem with the
ba dum ba dum
sound of the tracks below. Muriel wanted everyone on the train to see that she was with her mother on the way into New York City. Just the two of them on an outing to see a real live Broadway show—without Pia to hoard her mother’s hand and affection, without Owen to silently hover or Logan to darken the day with his sulking.

Though cold out, it was warm and thick aired inside the train. Queens flickered past like a flip-book. Puffy graffiti tags defaced the metal underpasses, paint flaked off the brick faces of dirty walk-ups. The apartments along the elevated tracks were so close you could see life inside: flickering TV sets, kettles billowing steam. Scanning the gauzy curtains for faces, Muriel saw an old lady with pink curlers in her hair and a man in an undershirt with an ashy cigarette dangling from his lips.
Their windows must rattle when the train passes
, she thought. Did they feel the same rumble in their chests, the same longing to get out?

“How do they sleep, Mama, with the noise of the train?”

“Keep your voice down, Muriel.”

In the tunnel beneath the East River, the rail joints echoed loudly off the greasy tiled walls. Muriel twisted herself around to look out the window for orange sprays of sparks, the flare of a used Kleenex tossed carelessly onto the track. She felt a rush of exhilaration with the metallic scraping of the train’s brakes. What if it didn’t stop?
Couldn’t
stop? And how did they get heat into a string of subway cars a block long? Did trains ever crash into each other? Hit head-on? Did a maid come through in the middle of the night and scrub the scuffed-up floors? Did she work all night and sleep all day and never see her children when they came home from school? Did her kids feel like they had no one at all?

“Do orphans have no
mother
, or no parents period?”

“Sit up straight, Muriel. Your dress is getting crushed.”

By the time Lidia and Muriel arrived at the Times Square station, it was about twenty minutes before curtain. The underground air smelled vaguely of vomit. Muriel covered her nose with one mittened hand, gripped her mother’s open palm with the other. Most of the travelers around them were in a rush to catch a train, make a connection, or exit up the stairs into the cold. Like a giant polka, people automatically sidestepped one another, except for the leaners who rested against riveted support beams with their hands out and their eyes glazed over, or the man in the corner with white crust around his mouth and a droopy coat hanging off one shoulder, its lining loose.

“Don’t stare,” Lidia said, though she really meant, “Don’t look.” Lidia believed you could make bad things disappear by looking the other way.

Outside, the afternoon air was the color of lead. Muriel’s cheeks stung instantly. The theater was only three blocks from the subway stop, but they were swarming with humanity. The sidewalk was crunchy with tiny salt rocks after the previous day’s snow. Hardened ice mountains along the curb were black topped with soot and backfire. Yet there was a distinctive kindness in the air. Bonded by the 9/11 attacks three months earlier, New York City had suddenly become a small town.

“Let me help you with that.”

“No, after
you
.”

“Lovely day, isn’t it?”

Everywhere were previously unfamiliar conversations. Nowhere was the city’s new Mayberry veneer more apparent than in Times Square. Once filled with neon signs promising
GIRLS
!
GIRLS
!
GIRLS
! and faded posters featuring topless women with black bars covering the nipples on their watermelon breasts, Times Square had morphed into Disneyland’s Broadway. The billboard sky drew Muriel’s eyes upward even as Lidia bulldozed through the crowds pulling her daughter behind her. They passed tourists with cameras pressed to their faces, caricaturists, a manly looking girl shivering in hot pants, someone in a giant red Elmo suit, and several sidewalk vendors with hunched shoulders who shifted left and right on their duct-taped sneakers. Young Muriel had never seen so many different people in such a small space. It was beyond thrilling. She wouldn’t have been surprised to see a procession of elephants galumphing down the center of the street. Only when the throng spontaneously erupted in applause as two New York City firefighters were spotted on the street did Lidia stop and become part of the people around her.

“I see why you want to live here, Mama,” Muriel said, adoringly. But her mother didn’t reply. She only smiled in a sad sort of way.

When they finally got to the theater, it was close to curtain. Through the golden doors, in the warm interior, Muriel gasped when she saw the green and orange swirls in the painted ceiling, the gilded molding, the glowing chandelier, the braided gold fringe at the bottom of the red velvet curtain. She burrowed into the soft worn chenille upholstery on her seat and put her hand on her chest to feel the thudding of her heart. It felt like she was sitting inside a jewelry box, as if she, herself, were a pearl. Inside that theater, the outside world disappeared. No longer was she a lonely and chubby kid.

With her
Playbill
sitting pristinely on her knees, Muriel softly folded her hands on her lap and beamed at her beautiful mother. At last Lidia genuinely smiled back and Muriel felt a rush of warmth wash over her. What a lucky girl. That magical Saturday belonged to
them
and no one else. It was a mother-daughter special day that was all hers. So there.

At that moment the lights in the theater blinked. Stragglers were escorted to their seats. Muriel felt the shift in the crowd as everyone settled in. Purses were snapped shut, throats were cleared. Cellophane crinkled as hard candies were unwrapped. Facing front, she listened to the mess of notes as the orchestra tuned up.

That’s when it happened. It was less than an instant, really, though it felt as long as life itself. The houselights faded to black. A complete eclipse of light. The curtain swept open sideways.
Swoosh
. The silence was so thick it was audible. In that solitary moment of absolute stillness between the last sputter of light and the first chord of music, Muriel felt the most exhilarating sensation. She was completely
aligned
. Amid a collectively held breath, in the middle of a sea of tilted heads, she felt a pure sense of containment
,
an utter oneness with the world. Her brain didn’t buzz with unanswered questions, her waist didn’t strain against her clothing, her feet didn’t feel too big for her ankles, and her nose wasn’t too large for the allotted space on her face. In that single moment of weighted anticipation—like the last second before sleep, before waking up in a dream—Muriel’s heart ceased to beat with the longing to be someone else. To be Pia, her perfect sister. For the first time in her young life, she felt present and accounted for.

Though she didn’t know it then, Muriel would fall into her fate that Saturday afternoon. Or fate would fall on her. By the time the cast twirled onto the stage she would be hooked for life.

With a gut-lurching jolt, the orchestra flared. The stage lights blazed yellow. Transfixed, Muriel was so immersed in the colorful wonder unfolding before her eyes, she barely noticed when her mother leaned over and whispered, “Be right back,” and didn’t return until intermission.

Chapter 13

T
HE
M
5 BUS
rumbled down upper Broadway, past the green glass walls of Julliard and the illuminated grand stair in front of Lincoln Center. Through the window Muriel watched her city pass by: a Duane Reade drugstore, salad bar deli, nail spa, dry cleaners, bank, another bank, and, of course, a Starbucks. The same pattern repeated all over the island.

Pia said, “So much to do.” Then she sighed.

Muriel agreed. New York was great that way. It was a comfort knowing the whole world was outside her door—well, down four flights and east two blocks—if she ever felt like entering it.

Uncharacteristically reaching down to squeeze her hand (what was with all this
touching
?), Pia softly smiled and stared out the window. Muriel recrossed her ankles and fastened a casual look on her face. Now that her sister’s tears had dried up, she prepared herself to say, “Let’s get this over with, sis. Why are you here?” Though of course she’d never use the word “sis” and had no idea why she’d even thought of it. Next she’d call something “fabulous.”