Henry's Sisters (6 page)

‘How deep?’ Janie said.

Cecilia’s face got positively dreamy.

Janie stifled a giggle.

The giggle made Cecilia blink herself right out of her trance.

She watched us watching her, our lips twitching as we tried to stifle those laughs.

She sat up straighter and her expression tightened. ‘Dr Silverton is a professional. I respect him as a professional and, I believe, he respects me.’

‘Of course he does,’ Janie soothed.

‘Absolutely. A professional,’ I said, drinking my beer.

‘He’s a fine man.’

‘Yes, so fine,’ Janie drawled. ‘And big.’

‘Big. Very big,’ I inserted. ‘Not too big.’

‘Shut up, you two,’ Cecilia said. ‘Let’s change the damn subject.’

‘Oh, let’s not,’ I said.

‘I like this one!’ Janie piped up.

Cecilia’s face got all snarly and vindictive again. ‘I’ve hired a private investigator on asshole’s girlfriend. We’ll see what comes up on that loose, amoral, plastic Barbie doll with a mind the size and substance of a testicle.’

We would indeed.

We went to a bookstore next, then explored 23rd Ave in northwest Portland, which is filled with specialty shops, a few bums who converse with themselves, moms with strollers, and little plastic horses tied to steel rings on the sidewalk that were used to tie up horses a hundred years ago.

It is part of Portland’s funkiness.

After fifteen minutes of aimlessness, Janie returned to the hospital. ‘Too much stimulus, too many cracks in the sidewalk, too many colours. I don’t like the geometries, it’s upsetting my “me” balance.’

Cecilia and I entered a coffee shop and brought our coffees to a window seat.

‘How are you, Isabelle?’

How was I? Not bad. Not good. ‘Holding. In a holding pattern. Like a jet that’s not headed in a nosedive to the ground, but one that’s thinking about it.’

She didn’t like that answer. She cleared her throat. ‘How did it go there?’

‘Fine. It was splendid.’

‘No, tell me the truth.’

I drank my coffee. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘I tell you everything.’

‘And I tell you everything I think you need to know. I’m better. That’s it.’

‘That’s not fair.’

‘What’s not fair? That you choose to share your life titbits with me, but I don’t want to analyse to death each detail of my life?’

‘Shit. You shut me out.’

‘Live with it, Cecilia. I am.’

Sometimes things are so insanely private, you don’t even want to talk about them with yourself. Don’t talk about them, don’t wrestle with them, don’t let them run you over. Let it be.

I thought Cecilia was going to fight it out, strangle it out of me, but, surprisingly, she didn’t. We had enough stress in this family. How much stress and tension can one family hold before it explodes or implodes? Must all problems be dissected? What does that help?

Cecilia nodded and placed her hand over mine.

Cecilia is not given to a lot of affection, so I was surprised.

And touched.

I thought I was going to choke and bawl and coffee would spurt out of my nose.

She squeezed my hand and I squeezed back.

And there we sat, in the window seat of a coffee shop, off a funky street in Portland, holding hands with a little plastic horse attached to a steel ring on the sidewalk.

Sometimes that’s all you can do, I think. Hold hands. Because life gets so scary sometimes, so bleak, so cold, that you are beyond being able to be comforted by mere words.

People probably thought we were gay, but I’d stopped worrying a long time ago what people thought of me, and so had Cecilia. Childhood had beat that right out of us.

We held hands. We did not let go.

‘She’ll eventually be fine, back to her dancin’ and high kickin’ ways,’ the doctor told us after the operation.

It was the Hispanic doctor, Dr Janns. When Momma had first met him she had asked him if he had had to spend his childhood picking berries in farmers’ fields.

‘No, I didn’t.’ He had shaken his head, gracious enough to let Momma’s inflammatory comment go. ‘My ol’ man was a career military man, tougher than nails, so we grew up all over the world. Like vagabonds. We didn’t ever pick berries. Too busy learning German or Spanish or Korean. New country, new language. My mom was a battle-axe.’ He swung his hand like an axe. ‘When we weren’t learning how to squawk and swear in the native tongue, hell if our mom wasn’t haulin’ us around by the ears to the opera and ballet. I prefer the ballet, myself. You?’

Momma seemed surprised by this. ‘Oh. Well. Hmm.’

I waited for her to change the subject. This man didn’t fit her profile, so she was stuck.

‘You look too young to be a doctor,’ she accused him. ‘Almost a child. Are you a child?’

He grinned at her. He had a lot of perfect white teeth. ‘You look too young to have heart surgery, ma’am, you gorgeous queen, you movie star, you, so we’re gonna fix the ticker on up and kick ya right on outta here.’

I saw the corners of Momma’s smile tip up.

Dr Janns now grinned at us with those white teeth. ‘Your mom came through fine. She already told one of the male nurses that nursing wasn’t for men and asked if he was a sissy.’

‘Obviously the operation did not soften her disposition,’ I drawled.

The doctor grinned. ‘Difficult operation, hard on the body. But then, we’re rippin’ people open, pumping the ol’ hearts for ’em and clampin’ ’em back up again. What can ya expect?’

Sheesh.

‘I understand that her mother has dementia and you have a special-needs brother at home. She’ll stay here for a while, chill, relax, she’ll dig it, then we’ll send her to that movin’ and groovin’ retirement centre in Portland to recover and get back swingin’ again.’

Janie snuffled. Cecilia got all teary but didn’t let a tear drop, not a one. She is not into weakness. Finds it appalling. I was relieved Momma was OK and relieved that I felt relieved. It made me feel more human to myself, as if I could still love a mother like Momma.

‘We’ve tried to get the dragon to go to the retirement centre, but she’s refused,’ I said.

‘The dragon will go,’ the doctor almost sang out.

‘Huh. You don’t know our dragon.’

He hummed a happy song. ‘I told her that there were many healthy people there. Many healthy men. And there’s dancing and trips. I had no idea your mother was a dancer in her youth.’

I cleared my throat, Cecilia made a sound between a whistle and a gasp, and Janie hummed.

Yes, Momma had been a dancer. Of sorts.

‘So she agreed to go?’

‘Yes. Definitely. She’s a character. A free spirit. A warrior.’ He clenched his fist and raised it. ‘Awesome!’

‘That’s one way of putting it,’ Cecilia said.

‘Any chance, doctor, that you sewed her mouth shut?’ I raised my eyebrows.

Momma was still out cold when we went in to visit. For once in her life, she seemed tiny, barely a bump under the white sheets, the machines humming, the nurses and doctors in and out, the IV line a clear snake above her.

We stared at our petite, silent momma, lost in our own thoughts.

‘She’s gonna be raving when she realises she’s not in her pink robe,’ I observed.

‘She’s going to have a fit because her make-up is smudged,’ Janie said, with worry.

‘She’s not going to like the food here,’ Cecilia said tiredly.

I didn’t hesitate. ‘I’m thinking it’s time we returned to Trillium River.’

‘Shit, yes,’ Cecilia said. ‘I’m with you.’

‘Oh yes. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go,’ Janie breathed. ‘The nurses can handle her and I know she’ll upset my spiritual balance if I’m here when she wakes up.’

‘Out we go,’ I said, turning.

Janie was out the door first and into the hallway before I could say, ‘Escape, ladies, before the volcano wakes up and explodes.’

She didn’t even bother smiling.

Soon we were sailing by the gorge, our hair flying with the wind, like pinwheels, for once not trying to talk, our thoughts our own as they tilted and spun and finally settled into a pattern of peace as we headed back to Trillium River. Janie pulled out a Yo-Yo Ma CD from her bag and we floated along on the notes, pitching and diving and soaring.

Three sisters.

And Yo-Yo.

‘I’m a practising Mormon now.’

The silence at the table would have been complete if Cecilia had not stabbed her fork into the spinach ravioli with unnecessary force at her daughter, Kayla’s, announcement.

It was a typical dinner at Grandma’s house with me, Cecilia, her girls Kayla and Riley, Henry, and Janie. Henry was wearing a shirt with Big Bird on it; Grandma was in her black pilot’s outfit, her goggles atop her head; and Velvet, the caregiver, was wearing a blue velvet dress.

Kayla is fourteen, Riley is thirteen. They have the blonde hair of their mother and the brown eyes of their father. They are sharp as tacks. Kayla studies religions and has papered her room with pictures from
National Geographic
. Riley is obsessed with physics and reads science books for fun.

‘You’re a practising Mormon?’ Janie asked Kayla, taking a sip of lemon tea, then putting her teacup on a doily.

Cecilia glared at her daughter.

‘Yes, I am.’

‘I thought you were Catholic,’ I said mildly. Kayla is hilarious. She antagonises Cecilia until Cecilia’s about to pop.

‘I go to a Catholic church, because I’m
forced to against my will
, but I’m a practising Mormon.’

‘Ah. How do you practise being a Mormon?’ I asked.

Grandma made the sound of a plane’s engine. Then she dropped her fork and clasped her hands together. ‘Dear God, this is Amelia. I pray for my plane. Don’t let it pretzel. I pray for my gas. I hope there’s enough of it. I pray for the natives here. They seem friendly. I pray for my bottom bullet wounds. Amen.’

Henry puffed out his chest. ‘I wear my Big Bird shirt today!’

‘Well, I’m reading the book of Mormon,’ Kayla said. ‘And I’m studying Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. Did you know that a prophet named Moroni came to Joseph Smith and told him where to find a book written on metal plates? I want Moroni to come and sermonise me. I am waiting for him and listening intently.’

Cecilia stabbed her ravioli again. Spinach squished out.

‘Now, last month you were studying Buddhism and said you were a Buddhist,’ Janie said. ‘You told us you were going to be reincarnated.’

‘That’s right. I studied Buddhism. I know that when I die I’ll come back to earth. Maybe as a person. A man or a woman. Maybe as a leaf. I also spent time in meditation, I accepted the Four Noble Truths, and I pursued my own path of enlightenment.’

‘Why don’t you tell them about your Jewish month, too, Kayla?’ Cecilia snapped. ‘Let’s make a complete circle here.’

‘Well, the month before that I was Jewish. I asked six rabbis for wisdom, three of them online, studied Moses and the Ten Commandments, said prayers three times a day, and baked challah bread.’

Cecilia grunted.

‘I like bread,’ Henry said. ‘I squish bread. Ducks like bread. You want go to duck pond?’

‘Air traffic control, this is HRT02233.’ Grandma spoke into her empty glass. ‘All is well. Give me a weather update. Storms ahead?’

I nodded. ‘Well, you’ve certainly been busy with your faiths.’

‘It’s important to explore and not naively swallow the religion that gets stuffed down your throat by someone who has never explored any other religion
in her life
.’ Kayla glared at her mother.

‘I don’t need to study another religion because I know what I am, Kayla: Catholic.’ More spinach squished out of that ravioli, then Cecilia attacked her roll.

I nodded. Cecilia had never wavered on her religion. Momma took us to the Catholic church on Sundays no matter where we were unless she was semi-comatose with depression/fighting her mental monsters, and then she insisted we go without her.

After church, if Momma had roused herself, we had to stay so she could say a rosary. She always made us wait outside. A couple of times we snuck in because she was taking so long, then skittered right back out when we saw our momma sobbing at the altar.

‘You don’t even go to church, do you, Aunt Isabelle?’ Kayla asked, her eyes narrowed. ‘Are you an atheist?’

I put down my garlic bread. Here’s another genetic marker of being a Bommarito: we cannot have normal meals like normal people. Our conversations are often inflammatory.

Food has been known to fly. One time a chair. Another time an entire stuffed turkey. Screaming occurs. Cecilia reached for me one time
over
the table and landed on Momma’s casserole. Janie’s flipped the table. Glasses have broken. Whipped cream has been sprayed, hot dogs have been hurled like bombs, loaves of bread have been used as weapons.

It’s hereditary. When we first arrived at this house as teenagers, Momma and Grandma had a fight over Momma’s make-up (too much, looked trashy), and Grandma’s attitude (critical, judgmental), and Momma’s lack of visits over the years (she had deprived Grandma of her grandchildren). Momma threw a chicken leg at her mother, Grandma pelted an apple at Momma’s forehead. A handful of corn and a roll followed. Then a peach.

I glanced at the food on the table. Gall. Ravioli. Miniature square land mines. Salad that would be so slimy.

‘Jesus loves Isabelle!’ Henry said. ‘Yep.’

‘I’m not an atheist,’ I told her.

‘Are you agnostic? That means you doubt that God exists.’

‘I’m not an agnostic.’

‘You believe in God?’

‘Yes. I believe in God.’ I didn’t think about Him much, though. One does not like to think about God, or particularly hell, when one is living the life I live. ‘Basically, I’ve tried to stay in the shadows so God can’t see me.’

That didn’t stump smart ol’ Kayla. ‘You can’t hide from God in the shadows.’

‘God see you.’ Henry laughed. ‘God see you, Isabelle. He gots good eyes. You silly.’

‘Only if he squints his eyes and slinks around all the shadowy corners. I think I lost him a few years back when I was in the Middle East and he’s forgotten about me. They’re busy there, you know. Wars and famine and zero rights for women, who are treated like goats. He’s got a lot of work on his to-do list there.’

‘He can see you, too, Kayla, and he sees a kid who’s changing religions monthly,’ Cecilia interjected.

‘God doesn’t care about that. He knows I’m searching for peace,’ Kayla protested. ‘Besides, religion is what people use as an excuse to kill each other.’

‘The natives may kill us!’ Grandma declared, wielding her knife back and forth like a sword fighter. ‘Watch out!’

‘Not always,’ I said. ‘I used religion as a way to guzzle red wine at church.’

Janie blew milk through her nose as she laughed. Cecilia choked and I had to hit her on the back.

It was the holy truth, though. We used to sneak into the church and drink the wine out of paper Dixie cups on Wednesday nights. No one could understand why we laughed so hard while reciting our Hail Marys.

‘I don’t get it. It’s a sister thing, isn’t it?’ Riley asked. She was twisting hair around her finger. I don’t think she’d stopped twisting the whole meal.

‘Take your finger out of your hair. What is it? A finger corkscrew?’ Cecilia snapped.

She took her finger out. Riley’s hair was so thin, too…it used to be thick. Was I seeing bald spots, or was she styling her hair in a weird way?

‘So, Kayla,’ Janie said, picking up her teacup again. ‘You’re studying to be a Mormon?’

‘Yeah, and I’m going to church with my friend Shelley next week. She’s a Mormon. There’s eight kids in her family. Eight, Mom. You only have two. And they all will live together in heaven and on Sundays they have family days and they don’t fight.’

Cecilia stood up, arms spread, ‘Why didn’t anybody tell me I don’t have eight kids? I thought I had at least six. There’s only two of you? Nobody tells me jack anymore.’ She patted her huge stomach. ‘Maybe there’s one in there?’ She eyeballed her stomach. ‘Yooo-hooo! Anyone in there? Hello? Another baby? Maybe two?’

Kayla picked up a ravioli with her fork and aimed it at her mother.

‘Don’t you dare,’ Cecilia told her. ‘Don’t you dare.’

She put the ravioli down, scowling.

I threw one of my ravioli at Kayla.

Cecilia tossed a ravioli at Kayla, too. It landed on her face. She said, ‘Bless you, bad mother.’

I threw one at Janie. She jumped in surprise, and tossed one at Riley. Appropriately, it landed on her hair. Riley took it off her head and started squishing it through her fingers.

Henry laughed. He picked up a handful of ravioli and put them on his head. ‘Look me! Look me! I have ravioli nest on my head! Ravioli nest. I need a bird!’

Grandma stood up straight, pulled her goggles over her head, and straightened her flight jacket. ‘I am ready to take off now.’ She grabbed a handful of ravioli and threw them into the air, then climbed on top of the table and sat in the middle of it. ‘There’s weather ahead! Weather ahead!’ she screamed. ‘Prepare for a crash landing! SOS! SOS!’

We knew what to do or Grandma would get all upset. We pretended to pull on our own flight goggles, dropped napkins on our heads, and held on to our seats while we rocked back and forth.

‘Hang on! We’re going down! We’re going down!’ She shouted into her glass, ‘SOS! SOS!’

We all threw some more ravioli squares, then we crashed.

Grandma stopped abruptly, sighed heavily. ‘We’re lost.’

Grandma was so, so right.

We were lost. I tossed a slice of garlic bread at Cecilia.

She caught it in mid-air and rolled her eyes.

Velvet helped get Grandma to bed after dinner while we girls did the dishes.

Velvet Eddow was the skinniest person I’d ever seen and reminded me of Mrs Ichabod Crane without the horse. She was six feet tall with white curling hair she piled on top of her head and strong bones in her face. She was not younger than seventy-five and had a thick, gentle, rolling southern drawl she’d acquired after living for fifty years in Alabama. Those words left her mouth like honey, with the honey winding its way around each syllable, smooth and gold and yummy.

Sometimes she used ol’ southern sayings and sometimes I knew she was making them up on the fly.

I’d watched her with Henry and Amelia Earhart. She was brilliant and, most important, kind. It did not take us more than a day to beg her to move into the spare bedroom in the house until further notice.

She gave us a hug and said, ‘Well ain’t that the berries! Sure, sugar, I’ll come help y’all. This takes the cake!’

In college the woman with the honey drawl studied engineering when it was an all-male domain. ‘The men didn’t even know what to do with me. I wasn’t their mother or their sister or their girlfriend. But I was smarter than them. They didn’t get that part. It baffled the heck out of all of ’em.

‘Men are easily baffled, though, darlin’, don’t ever forget that. Their brains think like porn. That’s the only way I can describe it, darlin’, like
porn
.’ She dragged that word out real long. ‘One part of their brain thinks, the other part is holding a breast in his hand, at all times. I’m givin’ that to you as free advice, darlin’.’

‘I’ll remember that, thank you.’

‘Men are for amusement only. They are treats. Like candy. Like ice cream on an Alabama afternoon. A dessert. They are not the main course. As soon as you have a man in your life who becomes the main course, that is the time, my sweet, when you should go on a diet. Right that second. Men are for dessert only.’ Envision: honey.

‘Yum, yum,’ I told her.

‘They are yummy.’ She winked at me. ‘But never take them seriously. A bite here and there is puh-lenty. All three of my husbands died, bless their pea-brained souls, but I never thought of them as the chicken and potatoes. They were always the flamin’ cherries jubilee at the end of dinner.’ She stared off into space. ‘And there was many a time, darlin’, that I wanted to set them on fire.’

OK dokay.

As long as she didn’t set any men on fire in the house with her cherries jubilee, we’d be good.

Later that night, about one o’clock, I headed for the middle of the grass near a huge weeping willow tree in the yard. The moon was almost smack over my head and the stars were bright white holes in the deep soft black.

I closed my eyes against my life. I thought about my loft in Portland, the view of the river, my cameras I could hide behind, and my darkroom I could work in for hours. Dark on dark.

I wanted the aloneness of my life, even though it came with the familiar thick blackness, the blackness I struggled to contain and felt lost in. I didn’t want this mess here.

All the emotion.

The fighting and the stress. The total lack of control. The incessant responsibility, the small town, the Momma element.

I wanted my loft.

The wind meandered over my face.

What the hell was I doing here in Trillium River, I asked myself.
What the hell?

One sole star twinkled at me. I rubbed my hands over my face, then breathed in a touch of wind.

I knew why I was here.

I knew.

About a year after Dad and his jungle nightmares took off, Momma told us she was a dancer. We thought that was pretty cool. She had been working as a waitress during the day but she kept getting fired because of Henry.

Henry cried when he had a sitter and if he wasn’t crying he was ill with one of his many health problems – asthma, chronic colds, sleeping problems that produced colds, continual stomach aches, pneumonia, and ear infections – and she had to be home to take care of him.

So Momma would soon be fired for taking too much time off, we’d rapidly be broke, she’d get that empty no one’s-home blankness in her eyes, then go to bed for a few days or a few weeks, and the hard-core struggling would begin.

When Momma told us she had a job as a dancer the first time, we were living in Massachusetts. We envisioned her with one of those Las Vegas showgirl type costumes doing the cancan. Why we thought that, I don’t know.

All I knew was that Momma started working nights and left us notes on pink paper on what to do and not do when she was gone. Janie, Cecilia, and I watched Henry when she left about two hours after we got home from school. What we liked about that job is that Momma always brought food home after her shift so we’d have it the next night for dinner.