Strange Sisters (3 page)

She always thought of it as
her
hair, of course; instead of
his
hair. Not that the gender really mattered at all, because in the end it came to the same thing.

She'd discovered the poem by accident a long time ago. She'd been in one of her depression periods, and this one had gone on and on with no sign of lifting, and she'd gone into the public library back home because she'd just happened to approach it, and it seemed like a good place to go. It was very quiet there, cool dusk in the stacks, with great stains of sunlight on the floor of the reading section and dust particles suspended in the shafts slanting down from the high windows.

She'd taken the thin volume off the shelf, and it had fallen open in her hand right to the poem, as if it were pointed at her. Anyhow, she was sensitive to ideas of reference, and she always
believed
that it was pointed. The poem was a kind of revelation, and she never forgot it. She remembered it word for word, and sometimes when she was alone at night she lay in bed and repeated it to herself, and sometimes, on her bad days, which were frequent, she awoke in the morning, as she had now, with the lines in her mind.

Portland was a prison, she knew. She hadn't ever been in prison, although it now seemed that she might go there; but that didn't matter, because prison, like hair, could be taken to mean something else entirely. That was the thing about the poem. You could make it mean just about whatever you wanted it to, and so there wasn't any use getting technical.

As far as she was concerned, because of her idea of reference, it had only one meaning, however. That was why she always remembered it exactly, even without ever referring back to it again, and why she repeated it to herself at night and at the beginning of her bad days. Not that it brought her any comfort or made the bad day any the less bad. On the contrary, it deepened her depression and hardened her despair. It was like pressing on a sore place, repeating the poem or just thinking it, and that's why she did it.

Thinking back, which she often did in spite of the fact that she knew it was bad for her, she had the feeling that everything had begun with the scent of flowers. Beyond the scent, far back in the mists of beginning, there was the shadow of a man who had been her father, but in her mind he was someone who had had nothing to do with anything. He had died of something, and he had been buried someplace, but this was academic knowledge, devoid of significance. She realized, naturally, that this was irrational, that some part of her was of necessity a development of some part of him, but the realization didn't give him any more substance in her mind. He was before the beginning, and the beginning was the scent of flowers.

There was, first, the scent of lilies, and it was strange that this scent which signified the beginning for her should have signified the end for someone else. The lilies lay in the living room in a large spray on top of her mother's casket, and the scent filled the room to the point of suffocation and crept out through all the house and even out into the yard. She had gone out into the yard to get away from it, but it had followed her there.

She always had a sense of guilt about her mother's death, because she hadn't felt sufficient grief. But that wasn't exactly true. At first, she had felt very intense and genuine grief, even if it was in large part loneliness and terror of loneliness, but then Aunt Stella had arrived, and after that it was impossible to feel anything except a consuming sense of anticipation that was almost as terrifying in its own way as the loneliness had been.

Aunt Stella was beautiful. She was certainly the most beautiful creature God had ever made, and it was difficult to believe that she was really the younger sister of the thin, bitter, bone-tired woman who lay, no longer tired nor bitter nor anything at all, under the weight of lilies, in the living room. Aunt Stella was twenty-eight at the time, but she could have passed for less. Her hair was shoulder length and loose, and it shone in the light almost like silver. Her eyes were blue and wide and soft with a kind of secret laughter, and her mouth was wide, too, and soft, too, and it seemed always to tremble slightly with the same laughter that was in the eyes.

There were so many beautiful things about Aunt Stella— or, as she insisted upon being called with a delicious familiarity that was nearly sufficient to burst the heart, just Stella. But more beautiful than everything else, perhaps, were her hands. Long, narrow hands with long, scarlet-tipped fingers, wonderfully certain and talented and incredibly gentle. Cupping your face or stroking your cheek, they achieved in a touch an intimacy that was a wild, singing delight. As a matter of fact, Stella was naturally accomplished in the achievement of intimacy. She was other things, too, of course. She was kind and generous and full of fun, and she was about as bad for a starved and lonely girl as anything that could possibly have happened.

It was the scent that Stella wore, more than the scent of lilies, although they were inextricably mixed, that signified the beginning. Simply because Stella was herself the beginning, and the scent was the first thing known of her. It preceded her into the room where Kathy sat, and it stood waiting, sharp and light and strangely penetrating, like something alive, for Kathy's attention. The scent was common enough, the essence of a common flower fixed in ambergris, but Kathy could never remember the name of it, would never be able to as long as she lived, because naming it would have destroyed it, would have established it as the ordinary thing it really was.

"You must be Kathryn," Aunt Stella said, and Kathy looked up with sudden, breathless expectancy at the beautiful woman filled with secret laughter.

"Yes."

"Did your mother call you that? Kathryn?"

"Mostly."

“What else did she call you? A pet name?"

"Yes. Kitten."

The slender arches of brows were extended for a moment above Aunt Stella's eyes, and her silent laughter grew briefly to the stature of husky sound.

"Oh, I don't believe I like that. Kitten, I mean. I think a girl should be called something she can grow up with, don't you?"

"I guess so."

"What would you like me to call you?"

"I don't know. I haven't thought about it."

"How about Kathy? It's a nice name, and it uses part of your real one. Do you think you would like that?"

The affectionate diminutive acquired on her lips a quality of magic. It swelled and sang in the house of death.

"Yes, I'd like that very much."

"Good. That's settled, then. And you must call me Stella. I'm afraid I couldn't bear being called Aunt. Let me hear you say my name once, just to make us better acquainted.

Kathy tried to force the name through the hard, hurting constriction in her throat, but the monstrous familiarity with such a shimmering, charming woman was more than she could manage. The sound came out a dry, strangled gasp, and Stella's voice in response was edged with alarm.

"Oh, now. You're not going to cry, are you?"

"No."

"No doubt it's just that I'm strange. Do you think you could learn to like me?"

"I like you already."

The laugh again, the husky amplification of the inner secret. "That's nice. Then you should be able to say my name. Why don't you try again?"

This time she accomplished it. "Stella," she said, and the sound was like the closing of a door that would never be opened again, a small sound, definitive, shutting away everything that had gone before and making of the woman under the lilies a kind of static improbability, as if she had been a corpse from the beginning. .

Stella turned and dropped into an overstuffed chair, a sad construction of lumps and squeaks and worn plush. Her narrow skirt slipped up over shining, silken knees.

"That's better. Come here, Kathy."

Kathy went and stood beside her, and for the first time she felt the enchantment of Stella's long, slender hands, reacting to the delicate touch of fingers with an intensity that made her tremble. The fingers touched her hair, her temple, traced on her cheek four fines so light that the) seemed no more than a suggestion of contact.

"Would you like to come live with me from now on Kathy?"

"Oh, yes."

Now there was a rueful quality in Stella's voice. She lifted her shoulders and let them drop with a sigh. "That's good, because there doesn't seem to be any way out of it Oh, well, what the hell! Maybe a little responsibility will be good for me. But I shouldn't swear in front of you should I? Did your mother ever swear?"

"Once in a while. When she got very angry about something."

"Oh, sure. Only under sufficient provocation, I'll bet your mother didn't like me, Kathy. She didn't approve of me. Did you know that?"

"No."

"Well, she didn't. If she had, she could've made an easier time of it for herself and for you, too. Then you and I could have been friends long ago. But no matter now. Did you know I was married once?"

"No."

"I was. The man's name was Lonnie, and he was very handsome and exciting, but he didn't do the kind of thing! people approve of. With their help, he died young, so you see it's not only the good it happens to. But, anyhow, he left me lots of money, and it will be fun to have you help me spend some of it. Would you like lots of money to spend?'

"I think so."

"Good." The light, electric hand moved again, hair and temple and cheek. "You're really quite pretty, you know. Something done with your hair and a few attractive frocks will make a big difference. How old are you, Kathy?"

"Ten."

"So old? Then it's high time something was done." She leaned back in her chair and laughed again, and at last the sound was full-bodied, though still light—an airy, antic sound tumbling over itself to get past her lips. "Now suppose you run out into the yard and let me start finding out what's left to be done here."

Obediently, Kathy went out into the yard and sat under a tree and watched the slowly shifting pattern of the leaves on the grass, and the next day they buried her mother in the cemetery at the edge of town. She sat on a hard, folding chair as the casket descended into the earth, and for a moment she felt again the intense grief and at the same time the guilt that came because the grief was not enough. Then she was aware of Stella's hand on her own, and she looked up at the silver hair shining in the sun, and grief and guilt were emotions that had no place in the new world.

Then, after a few days of final preparation, she went with Stella to the new town where Stella lived. It was not a larger town than the old one, but it seemed larger because Stella lived there. Neither was it a more beautiful or a more exciting or a more anything town, but it seemed more of everything for the same reason. What Stella touched or influenced in any way always took to itself something of the essence of Stella.

Stella's house, however, was
really
larger than the old one. It was built of brick behind a wide lawn with a box hedge around it and elm and maple trees growing between the hedge and the house. There were eight rooms in the house, four upstairs and four down, and there was a colored woman who came in every day to keep the rooms clean. She also cooked and laundered and told Kathy stories about Stella, how wonderful Stella was and how all men, or at least a lot of men, were crazy about her.

This was true. There were a lot of men. Almost every night, after Kathy was upstairs in bed, one of them called for Stella. It became the colored woman's duty, after Kathy came to stay, to remain in the house until Stella's return at whatever hour. Kathy didn't like the men. She regarded them as trespassers, thieves of the time she might have had with Stella herself, and her attitude toward them went through a slow metamorphosis from a general resentment to a childish, particularized hatred as she learned to identify them as individuals.

With the door of her room open so she could hear, she would lie in bed and follow in detail the audible stages of each arrival and departure. Allowing for a little variation in the time element, they all followed a routine that acquired for Kathy in its constant repetition the quality of torture, like the ancient practice of letting water drip on someone's forehead—the car stopping at the curb in front of the house, footsteps on the approach from the street, the doorbell, Stella's voice in greeting and the masculine response. Sometimes, if Stella wasn't taken away at once, there would be other sounds—of ice and glass, of music, of the many small supports with which a man and a woman may shore a frail relationship.

She fought sleep. She fought it with all her strength in the hope that she could be awake when Stella returned, and sometimes she was successful. There was a reason for this. She and Stella shared the same room, and this was because Kathy, in the time following the death of her mother, was subject to nightmares. She awoke screaming in the night, terrified by the pressing darkness. So Stella, a warm and responsive person with a genuine and growing love for her niece, had taken Kathy into her room. They had twin beds, and it was a wonderful arrangement, because Kathy, if she could only stay awake, could have with Stella the last delicious intimacy of the day.

Lying very still, looking through the narrowest of slits that left vision a little blurred by her lashes, she watched Stella come into the room and turn on the soft light through which she moved while getting ready for bed.

Stella's hair was usually a little disheveled and her lips sometimes a little smudged, and she moved about her business with a kind of floating dreaminess to the accompaniment of a trivial tune which she hummed to herself. As in everything she did, there was a charming disorder in Stella's undressing. Moving to the tune, in and out of the adjoining bathroom, she left her dress here and her slip there, one stocking one place and the other another, and so through a Utter of shimmer and froth until she stood at last by the bed in a transparent cloud of nightgown.

She learned soon enough that Kathy watched her. The knowledge gave her a sincere, unanalyzed pleasure, and she fell into the habit of stopping beside Kathy's bed when she returned in darkness from turning off the light