Other Shepards
Authors: Adele Griffin
Adele Griffin
For Jody
Many thanks to my editor, Donna Bray, for all her support and encouragement.
A Personal History of Adele Griffin
geneva
“S
HE OKAY?”
“Oh, yes, fine. She’s fine.”
“Don’t look so good. Your sister?”
“Yes. She’s fine. It’s elevators. She hates them.”
Geneva hears us but her eyes don’t move from lighted button number nine, its glowing promise of escape.
“Hard thing to hate, living in Manhattan.” The man’s smile rests on Geneva, who stretches her mouth into a straight line. I smile back at him instead, as I squeeze the tips of my sister’s sweating fingers.
The elevator pings to a stop on the fourth floor. The man gets off and a largish woman steps on, candy-coated in perfume and eating into our space with her sturdy backside and pocketbook.
“Five more floors and we’re done,” I say. Geneva blinks. A dew of sweat breaks at the hairline above her pulsing temple.
“My neck is closing in on me,” she whispers. “I can’t breathe. I need to find a bathroom.” The woman cuts her eyes at Geneva. I know my sister feels the stare by the way she scowls and shrivels into her coat.
“Is that White Rain?” I say to distract the woman, although I know it’s not White Rain because that’s Mom’s scent.
Her eyes soften. “Rose water,” she answers, touching two fingers to her collarbone. “It’s just rose water, dear. I’ve worn it since I was young.”
I nod. “It’s really nice.”
“You could get some for yourself at Bigelow’s.”
Using just enough voice for me to hear, Geneva whispers, “Thumbkin.” Then she begins mouthing the Hail Mary at hyperspeed. I frown hard to close up my smile, now that it strikes me how the woman does resemble Thumbkin, a stern, pointy-faced elf from one of our old bedtime stories. Geneva has a terrible knack for fitting the perfect word onto a person, neat as a hat to a head.
“Is she all right?” The woman tilts her Thumbkin chin toward Geneva.
“Oh, she’ll be fine. Elevators make her tense.”
I look over at Geneva, who is racing through her words—“Artthouamongwomenblessedisthefruit”—and my mind thumbs through bathroom possibilities. Carr’s probably won’t have one for customers, but there’s one in the lobby, except you have to get the key from the grumpy doorman, who I didn’t see on the way up. But isn’t there a Chinese restaurant right across the street and down half a block? I have to be sure. I don’t know much about this Flatiron district building, except that it’s mostly gallery space and some specialty shops, and I can’t just spin Geneva up and around these breathless heights and spaces. I pounce to a decision.
“We’ll get Mrs. Motahahn to help us.”
As the elevator opens, Geneva flings herself free, galloping to the end of the hallway, where she heaves open the glass door inscribed with a whispery frost of cursive announcing
CARR’S ARTISTIC EXPRESSIONS
. I follow more sedately, betting myself:
if you can walk only on the diagonal patterns of the wood without stepping out of line, then Geneva gets a bathroom.
Mrs. Motahahn’s eyes entreat me as soon as I’ve opened the door. Geneva’s head turtles into her shoulders. “I’m sorry, Geneva, but you’ll have to use the one in the lobby. You should have thought …”
“We better go now, Holland,” she says. “I need to go.”
“Oh, please, Mrs. Motahahn, she’s very sick!” My voice unhinges to a squeak. Customers’ heads stiffen, listening. “She really needs that bathroom. It’s the flu. She’s been sick all week. My parents didn’t want me to take her out today, so this is all completely my fault. I’m such a dummy, dragging her uptown.”
“But … I don’t think, and with Mrs. Carr not here right now …” Mrs. Motahahn draws her pen from her cap of silver hair and taps an uncertain beat against her palm.
“Please. It’s all my fault. I don’t think there’s time to take her downstairs.”
“I mean, it’s just for, it’s not really for, but if she might be sick, we do have, ah, have, um …” Mrs. Motahahn scrutinizes Geneva, then shakes her head. “Wait here, girls.”
“She’s getting the key,” I say under my breath as we watch Mrs. Motahahn wriggle out from behind the counter and disappear behind a back door. “Another few seconds and you’ll have a room all to yourself. Then you can do whatever, run water, whatever.”
Geneva’s bathroom emergencies depend on her illness. Sometimes she needs the toilet, or at least needs to be near it; other times she has to wash her hands and face until she feels calm and sanitized. She usually performs her water rituals alone, although I have stood by her in more than a few public rest rooms, glaring off onlookers as my sister repeatedly splats a cupped hand with the pink or lemon-yellow liquid soap, then rinses herself into a sense of calm. Not even the professional help our parents have employed over the years can make sense of Geneva’s problem; her explanation that water “fixes me” is all we have to go by.
I rest my hand lightly on her arm, over the rough boiled wool of her car coat. I wear the same style coat, the same color gray. We wear berets to match, and beneath our coats, identical gray and yellow plaid kilts: the colors of Monsignor Ambrose, our school on West Thirteenth Street. The only difference is that I wear a yellow sweater, to show that I am in eighth grade, while Geneva is outfitted in the (uglier) gray vest of a sixth grader.
“What if she won’t let me? What’ll I do, Holland? If she says no? If I’m sick all over the floor?” Geneva’s voice is a sprinkling of sound. I once read that blue whales communicate with their kin by sending out low-frequency sound waves that extend for thousands of miles. Sometimes I believe that this is the way I must hear Geneva’s voice: sneaky tremors reverberating under my feet, shinnying up my spinal cord to my brain.
“Stop, you’ll only work yourself into feeling sicker. We’ll get the key. Here comes Mrs. Motahahn now. She’s waving for you to follow her. Go ahead, it’s okay.” I steer my sister behind the counter to where Mrs. Motahahn beckons. Geneva hesitates, then darts off.
Alone, I can relax into being a regular customer. I trail up and down the aisles, peering into glass-fronted cases. It was my idea to cab up to Carr’s after school to find Mom’s birthday present, but I didn’t tell Geneva about my plan until lunchtime, which probably wasn’t enough warning. Although I would have been happier to come by myself and let Geneva take half credit for the gift, she insisted on joining me. She always insists.
“I’ll be good,” she promised from her solitary perch on the windowsill of the gym, her favorite position during indoor recess. “I’ll help.”
“Are you sure?” She was chewing her lip, and I knew that she was not sure, only stubborn, but it would bruise her to think I’d rather go shopping on my own.
Now I wish I hadn’t told her.
“You said flu?” Mrs. Motahahn squints worriedly at me from behind the counter. “Holland? A flu?”
“Oh, yes. She’s been terrible all week.”
“Poor girl, it’s going around. You keep drinking that orange juice, or your parents’ll have their hands full. So there’s a little bud vase we just got in, third shelf from the bottom, right side, Holland, right side, Art Deco but not too arty, soft-paste porcelain, very sweet. Reminds me of your mom. When you phoned earlier, it kept running through my head all afternoon what would be right.” Mrs. Motahahn lowers her voice. “And it’s reasonable, cost-wise.”
The vase is pretty, a celery-green teardrop, and a quick flip-over confirms that Mrs. Motahahn is right about the price, too.
“This is perfect, Mrs. Motahahn. She’ll love it. Can we get it gift-wrapped? I’ll pay the extra.” I pretend to scratch my knee and stealthily remove the chunky billfold wedged in my sock. Money is something I’m more comfortable saving than spending, and as soon as so much as a dollar leaves my music box bank, I need to feel it pressed up against my skin until it’s time for us to part.
“Oh, aren’t you a sweet thing. Gift wrap’s complimentary. Not like at the big stores.” Mrs. Motahahn takes the vase from my hands and begins stuffing its insides with tissue paper. “How’s Macy’s treating your mom these days? It seems like eons ago I left.”
“She’s in bedding now,” I say. “She switched out of housewares last year. She likes it, though. She says it’s a nice change of pace.”
“Well, I don’t envy your job, honey, having to figure out a present for a mother who works in the world’s largest department store.”
“She’ll be glad we came here, to catch up with you. She always says how she wishes you were still at Macy’s.” Mrs. Motahahn smiles, and I can tell that she’s forgotten about Geneva, but I haven’t. What will I do if she decides to stay in that bathroom all afternoon? She did that once before, last summer, at an Olive Garden restaurant in New Jersey.
I help Mrs. Motahahn choose a silk ribbon and a tiny gilt-edged card. I ask about Percy, Mrs. Motahahn’s Siamese, and she tells me a funny story about how Percy chewed a hole in her favorite wool sweater. I am almost finished signing “love, Holland and Geneva” on the card when my sister emerges from the bathroom, and the “va” of her name is a flourish of relief.
“All done,” I say, trying to be brisk but sounding irritated, which I am. Why does Geneva even bother trying if she knows she’s never any help? Her drama only makes life difficult for everyone, excluding herself, of course.
“Elevator again,” she dares to whine.
“Oh, come on. You’re always better at down. Say good-bye to Mrs. Motahahn.”
My sister gives a limp wave and watery wedge of smile. I yank her through the doors and down the hall.
“Think of an elevator being like a cool ride in a spaceship,” I say, knowing exactly how the horror of this idea will ricochet through Geneva’s phobic little brain. Sometimes my patience gets eaten up by meaner urges, but it doesn’t seem fair that I always have to be the older, responsible one. For just one day, I’d like to see Geneva try being the big sister while I make the embarrassing scenes.
“Brett and Carla are coming for cake tonight,” Mom told me at breakfast this morning. “And they’re bringing the baby. Please try not to be an Ick.”
Ick
is Mom’s special word to describe anything that is overly touchy or sentimental.
Mom does not realize that my Ickness is inborn. Whether I am trailing my fingers across the surface of freshly folded bed sheets, savoring a mocha-chip ice-cream cone, or dabbing on some of my favorite perfume (Woods of Windsor’s Lily-of-the-Valley), my senses of touch and taste and smell are overwhelming delights. Mom prefers air kisses and thank-you notes: a look-but-don’t-touch kind of politeness.
“Freddie?” My mouth and fingertips were prickling, already itching to kiss and rub baby Freddie’s head, soft and warm and bald as a dinner roll. “Do you think they’ll let me hold him or change him or feed him or anything?”
Over her tea mug, Mom’s eyebrows shifted like wary antennae. “All I ask is that you don’t make people feel uncomfortable.”
Geneva is the opposite of Ick. She inches through her day inside an invisible plastic bubble. She shrugs off the hugs of overfriendly relatives and teachers. She hates participating in sports because they force you to smell other people’s sweat. She even flinches at television kisses. When people say Geneva and I are alike, what they mean is that we are close, the way spring and summer melt together but are separate and distinct.
On the drive down from Carr’s, Geneva sits up straight in the cab, her hands stapled together in her lap, her spine a tilted axis from the green-black plastic seat back, her face uplifted, her eyes closed. I know she is worn out from her earlier dramatics, upset that she didn’t have a say on Mom’s gift, and probably faintly nauseous from thinking about cab germs. I feel sorry for her, and I relent.