Sister (10 page)

I always passed my father on to my grandmother as quickly as I could, and then he complained about how my mother was never home and Sam was running wild and there wasn't a clean shirt to be found in the house. “I showed him how to use the washing machine,” my mother would say. “Mother, a man as worldly as Gordon claims to be should be able to push a few buttons.” But my grandmother sided with my father; a woman's place was in the home. The deaths of her oldest daughters still weighed on her heart, and she worried that my mother was
tempting Providence
, upsetting the natural order of things by leaving my father to make his own bed and drive Sam to school when he missed his bus. And Sam missed the bus whenever he could, oversleeping, dawdling over breakfast. One morning in November, my father pinned him beneath the sheets, cut off his long hair by force, then bent him over the bathroom sink where he shaved off the rest. “Maybe you'll hear me calling you better without all that hair over your ears,” he said. My mother told me the story privately; she asked me not to repeat it to my grandmother.

“I don't know what to do about them,” she said. “Every time I turn around, they're at each other's throats.”

One Sunday afternoon, she didn't come out to visit until late in the afternoon. My grandmother was napping, so we took a walk across the frozen fields at the edge of town, Jakey trotting happily ahead of us. When we got to the picnic table in the Yodermans' apple orchard, we sat on top of it, side by side, our feet propped on the benches. The ice weighted the trees, and it seemed they were bending down to listen as my mother spoke to me about all the wonderful choices my life would offer me, choices her own
life had not presented. This year with my grandmother was a slight detour, but soon I'd be back in school, doing well again. When I graduated, I wouldn't have to get married right away. I could go away to school, find a career I loved. With her profits, she'd opened a special college fund for me and Sam. When I told her not to worry about me getting married or going to college, that I was praying for a vocation, she stopped, her breath leaving her mouth in small, irregular puffs. “The more you learn about yourself,” she finally said, “the better you'll be able to serve God. Your grandmother says you're musical like Elise.”

I nodded, slipping my mittened hands between my thighs and the cold surface of the picnic table so I could feel Elise's ring pinching my skin.

“Perhaps you could study music. Many of the greatest musicians praised God through their instruments.” She put her arm around me. She'd been buying me books she had never read but had heard were books an educated person should read:
The Great Gatsby, My Antonia, An American Tragedy
. She used that phrase often now—“an educated person”—and whenever she said it, she'd gesture at me as if it were my name. But the books made me nervous; they were filled with un-Godly people, people who lived lives of sin. My grandmother told me not to read them. She gave me
The Catholic Digest
, a copy of
The Song of Bernadette
that had once belonged to Elise, pamphlets on dating, growing up, loving God, that were distributed through the Church. I liked them better than my mother's books. They showed only people who had a clear sense of purpose, the sort of person I wanted to be, bright with the secret of faith.

“I'd like you to start taking piano lessons,” my mother said. “Maybe we could rent a piano for you when you come back home.”

“OK,” I said, although I wanted to tell her not to worry, I could just keep on living with my grandmother and playing Elise's piano. Usually, if I listened to a record once or twice, I was able
to play parts of it back, and one day I managed to sound out all of “Für Elise.” My grandmother listened in the kitchen doorway, and afterward she told me I could go through Elise's things and choose whatever I liked for myself. Now I drank from what was once her favorite mug, wore her nightgown to bed, decorated my nightstand with her piano figurines. I hadn't realized my own ear might have anything to do with my abilities, until Father Van Dan, visiting one day, said that I had “perfect pitch.” The phrase reminded me of the way a dog's ears lifted whenever it heard something. Perfect pitch. I liked the sound of the words. I whispered them over and over to myself so there was no chance I would forget.

“I have perfect pitch,” I told my mother.

“Really?” my mother said. “So does your brother—the guidance counselor told me.”

“Maybe he can take piano lessons too.”

“He doesn't want to,” my mother said.

“Why not?”

My mother stood up on the bench, dusted off the seat of the jeans she'd started wearing. She climbed to the tabletop and stood there, scanning the flat, snowy countryside as if she thought something might be coming toward us—an unfriendly dog, a storm. The sun was already starting to set. “Your father will tease him,” she said.

I shrugged as if it didn't matter. “That's just how Dad is. He makes fun. Like the nose-to-the-wall test.” My father had found me reading the classifieds, imagining myself as a waitress or a teacher, a salesman or a clerk. The jobs were divided into sections, one for women and one for men. I'd been scanning the men's section because it looked more interesting, but when my father came in, I dragged my finger over to the women's so he wouldn't be able to tease me. “Looking for work?” he said. “Good God. A career woman just like your mother.”

“I guess,” I said, which was what I always said. It was neu
tral, unassuming, dull, which meant my father would lose interest and go away. But that day he sat down on the couch beside me.

“You got the right qualifications?”

I shrugged.

“Let's see,” he said. “There's only one test a girl has to pass. Stand up,” he said, and he led me over to the wall, his hand on the back of my neck. “Put your nose to the wall,” he said, and when I did it, bending forward over my breasts, he laughed, shaking his head. “Nope,” he said, “not quite. They'll have to hire someone else.”

My mother came into the room and saw us standing there. I pressed my nose to the wall again; it was cool, unyielding, a good place to rest. I didn't understand. “Don't worry,” my father said, still laughing. “Your mother wouldn't get the job either, that's for sure.” My mother took me by the hand and led me from the room. “Don't listen to him,” she said. It was Sam who finally explained the joke to me: If a woman's nose could touch the wall, her breasts were too small for the job.

“I'm so sorry about that,” my mother said now, as if she had done something wrong. “That's why it's important for you to think about going to college, to have the skills to look out for yourself, even if you don't think you'll need them. I have no education, only three years' experience. This business is a huge risk, and it can't support two children. Your father and I both know that if it were just my income alone—” She stopped, then shrugged, and I briefly saw myself in that futile gesture. “It's not good to be too dependent on anyone,” she said.

“Except God,” I said.

“Well, yes,” my mother said. “But God helps those who help themselves.”

“If it's His will, God can help anybody.”

“But don't you think it's His will that you go to college, make something of your life? Let your light shine instead of hiding it under a bushel basket?”

“I want to keep on living in Oneisha,” I blurted. I hadn't meant to say it like that, and my mother gave me a hurt, surprised look.

“I know we're going through a tough time right now, but we're a family, Abby. We belong together.”

“But I feel good here. I'm not sleepy anymore.”

“You're still sleeping,” my mother said, “only now you don't even know it. Abby, there's a whole world out there!” She waved her arms at the horizon, but all I saw were the Yodermans' cows standing shoulder-to-shoulder at the feeder like a black and white bracelet, Jakey's yellow tail poking up from the weeds, the small cross of houses that was Oneisha, Wisconsin. The world ended where the sullen winter sky met the stubble of fields not quite completely covered with snow. The world was the smell of frozen apple crushed beneath my heel, the wet black bark of the apple trees, my mother's voice saying, “I want you to come home. Maybe in another week or so.”

For the next few nights I had terrible dreams, and in them I was running from a man who I knew was going to catch me and do unspeakable things. Sometimes the man was chasing Sam too, and then I had to make a decision, because he would be able to catch only one of us and, being older, I could run faster. Should I save myself? Should I fall behind, saving Sam's life with my own? Night after night I woke up on the floor, twisted in the blankets, with my shoulder or hip or head stinging from the fall, and always I was the one still alive, intact, safe, facing the open arms of Jesus.
Let My Light Guide You
.

When I told my grandmother about the dreams, she spoke to my mother, and after that there was no more talk of my going home in the near future. And soon the dreams were forgotten in the rush to prepare for Christmas. My grandmother and I spent entire days baking for the children living in the trailers south of Farbenplatz, the elderly in the nursing home in Holly's Field, the sick sentenced to Christmas in the hospital. I supervised the
younger children on a hayride sponsored by the church. I helped make the queen-size hand-stitched bear paw quilt that would be raffled away on Christmas Day. I made ornaments for our Christmas tree—walnuts rolled in glitter, clothespin angels, paper snowflakes, tinfoil chains.

Father Van Dan arranged for me to sing the Ave Maria at Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, and I rehearsed with Eva and Serina Oben, Eva conducting me with one long finger. Afterward, they gave me sight-reading lessons, loaned me armfuls of music I could study on my own. How easy it was to make music! I'd accidentally found a language I could use to express absolutely anything I wanted, even forbidden, sinful things like anger and desire. It was the first time I could remember feeling as though it was all right to speak my mind, and suddenly I was never at a loss for things to say. I practiced on Elise's piano two hours every day, and then I walked over to the church, where I experimented with the organ. Now that I knew the notes, I could sound out everything I heard. I could even transpose things into different keys without fumbling. My mother had heard about a Milwaukee Conservatory teacher who came to Horton twice a month. She got me on a waiting list for lessons, paying the reservation fee out of her own business earnings when my father insisted fancy lessons were unnecessary, that if I had to have lessons at all, a local teacher should be good enough.

“Are you nervous about Christmas Eve?” she asked. It would be the first time I'd performed for a real audience, including my father and Sam, who were also planning to come for the service. But that didn't bother me. I intended to sing for God and God alone. I'd been praying for a vocation, the absolute knowledge that my life was meant for Him. It was a feeling that, according to Harv, was unmistakable when it came. “I guess it's like the way you describe music,” he told me, during another one of our conversations that left Monica rolling her eyes. “Understanding without words.” I wanted to understand. I wanted to be chosen.

At eleven-thirty on Christmas Eve, my grandmother and I walked over to the church, and I was grateful for the stinging snow, the bitter wind chilling me awake. My parents and Sam were already there, and at first they looked like any other family, lined up in a pew, Sam's blond hair cropped so short I could see his scalp shining underneath. Then, as we got closer, I saw what my mother hadn't described, what I had not imagined: deep clotted nicks where my father's razor had bit in. There was a noise in my head like bees. Suddenly I was remembering all the times my father held Sam and me down, one at a time, rubbing his coarse whiskers into our necks as we screamed and begged him to stop. When he grabbed me first, Sam could have run, but he never did, pummelling my father's shoulders, trying to set me free. My father laughed and pummeled him back, too rough; did he think it was all just a game? Sometimes he would take us for drives, letting the car swerve over the median or off the shoulder, accelerating so our stomachs lurched and our heads snapped back against our seats. He would tell us he was going to drive into Lake Michigan, and he'd edge the car inches from the drop-off. Nobody sneeze, he'd say.

My grandmother called my name; I was blocking the middle of the aisle. I stepped quickly over my father's knees, kissed my mother, sat beside my brother.

“Hi,” I whispered.

“Hey,” he said. The worst of the cuts was behind his ear; he noticed me staring, sank lower into the collar of his coat.

Offer it up to God
. When I rose to sing at Communion time, I stopped seeing Sam and my parents and grandmother. I didn't even think about the rest of the congregation. I walked to the altar, and as soon as Eva began to play, I opened my mouth and let my voice fill the church like a choir. As I sang, I prayed for God to accept the offering I made of myself, waiting for the feeling of absolute understanding that Harv had described. But I felt nothing except my own want, heard no voice other than my
own—and then not even that. The song was finished. Eva swayed to stillness. In the long moment before the congregation burst into spontaneous applause, I knew I had been refused. Harv was assisting Father Van Dan; at the Communion rail, he slid the gold platter beneath my chin. I saw my reflection there, terribly distorted.

“The body of Christ,” Father Van Dan said.

“Amen.” I could barely say it.
I believe
.

After Mass, people nodded to me, pressed my arm; a few of them said shyly what a pretty voice I had, how much like Elise. My grandmother nodded proudly, accepting compliments on my behalf; my mother scooped me into a hug, and even Sam said, “That was pretty good.” We'd been fasting since sundown, and when Harv emerged from the sacristy, we all walked back to my grandmother's house for pancakes and sausage and sweet fruit preserves, the same early breakfast we ate each year before everyone finally went home, stuffed and exhausted. My father put his arm around my shoulder, leaning too hard, the way he always did. “Congratulations,” he said, and I offered him my hand to shake. But when he tried his usual trick of squeezing too hard, I bent his thumb back as if I were snapping a carrot.