Very in Pieces

For Sara Crowe

Thank you for sticking by me and by this story.

i.

GO GET YOUR SISTER
.

It seems like a simple request. Unless, of course, your sister has turned into a raging ball of id, as impulsive and changeable as a summer storm.

Mom is still getting dressed as she says this. She's in her bra and underwear—full, soft curves where I'm all hard lines and angles. I'm lying on her bed trying to pretend that sweat is not soaking the back of my black linen dress and gathering behind my knees. I've never been good at pretending.

“I'm not sure where she is,” I tell my mom.

“Smart One, start in her room.” That's her pet name for me.
Smart One.
Ramona, my younger sister, has infinite names—Little One, Deep One, Luv—but I am always Smart One. Because I am. Smart, that is.

I hesitate a moment longer as if waiting might make
Ramona materialize like a hologram. I wouldn't put it past her. She doesn't appear, and so I rise, walk down the stairs from my parents' bedroom, and then go up the stairs to the turret that Ramona and I share.

Our house—Nonnie's house—seems to have been designed by a drug-addled architect. From the outside, it looks like a misshapen fortress: golden stucco with red terra-cotta shingles, more suited for California or the Southwest than our small New Hampshire town. There are two sets of stairs inside, one for each of the turrets. From inside, the inspiration is Frank Lloyd Wright, with sunken rooms and wide-open spaces.

At the top of the landing, I stand in front of Ramona's closed door. She'd never been a closed-door person until sometime last spring, maybe six or seven months ago. Over the summer, it got worse. It's like in anticipation of being in high school with me she felt she had to draw a box around herself.

There is the
thump, thump, thump
of a bass line. I knock and hear a moan that could be a yes, so I push open the door. Ramona is sprawled across her bed, face to the ceiling. It's hard to make her out at first, since the entire surface is covered with papers, books, and CDs, pilfered, I am sure, from my father's collection. The floor, too, is similar chaos and if you squint, it all looks like one flat landscape, and finding my sister is a game:
Where's Ramona?

“You need to get ready for the opening,” I tell her.

“What?” she asks without sitting up. “I can't hear you. The music is too loud.”

The music is not too loud. If it were too loud, she would not know I had spoken. Still, I raise my voice. “The opening. We're leaving soon. You need to get ready.”

She's my sister, my own flesh and blood, so I shouldn't want to kill her, and yet I do. Is there a name for that?
Patricide. Matricide. Fratricide. Sororicide?
It sounds dumb, like a horror movie about a bunch of blond, buxom sorority sisters chasing each other around with knives. Which, come to think of it, would probably make bajillions of dollars.

“I
am
ready,” Ramona replies. She is wearing the cutoff jean shorts she's been wearing the past three months. The exact same pair. In June she discovered some old peasant blouses in one of Nonnie's trunks, and those completed her uniform. Sometimes the cutoffs barely peek out from below the blouse. Tonight, though, she has on one of my dad's old concert T-shirts. From this angle it's hard to tell, but it looks like Dinosaur Jr., the one with the girl on the beach, hitching up her pants and smoking a cigarette. Ramona's hair, various shades of golden brown, splays out around her, and even from this distance I can see tangles. Her window faces south, out over the bay behind the house, and the light coming in is just golden enough that it looks like she is fading into a sepia-toned photograph. “You are not ready.”

She sits up. “I think it depends on what you mean by ready.” She grins merrily. “I mean, emotionally ready, I don't know. I think I am. Aesthetically ready? Well, I haven't researched the artist at all, so I suppose I'm not exactly ready in that sense. Then again, sometimes it's best to go into these things without
any preconceived notions.”

“Your outfit,” I say.

“Nonnie told me that an outfit is actually a set of tools. Isn't that interesting? Where are my tools?
What
are my tools?” She looks around the room. “Remember that old saw that Dad had? The one he kept on his desk as art?”

I rub my thigh where I still have a thick, raised scar from falling on the rusty saw during one of the epic games of hide-and-seek Ramona and I used to play. “Yes.”

“He didn't want to get rid of it, you know. He wanted to keep it, just up on a higher shelf. But really, who uses a saw as art? It's like that story—the one about the quilts and the daughter wants to hang them on the wall, but the mom, or maybe it's the grandmother, says they're quilts, they're made for the beds. And the daughter's like, ‘No, no, no, they're a piece of our cultural heritage and we need to protect them.' You know, I can't remember what they do with the quilts in the end.”

“You need to change,” I tell her.

“Into what?”

“Your outfit—your clothing—it's inappropriate.” She opens her mouth to speak, but I cut her off. “I don't need an examination of the word inappropriate.”

“I was just going to say that keeping a saw as art is inappropriate. Not a thorough examination by any means.”

“You know the type of thing you should wear to this. Put it on. And brush your hair.”

Her smile falters. “Aye, aye, captain.” But she doesn't move.

“We're leaving in twenty minutes.”

She flops back onto the bed. By some mix of grace and chance—Ramona, defined—she falls into the exact empty space her body left before, like a cutout doll returning to its paper.

It won't do any good to nag her. She'll be downstairs, or she won't. So I wander into the kitchen, where I open the refrigerator to see what we have to drink. There's about two sips of lemonade left in the bottom of the bottle. I add it to some sparkling water and pretend that's what I wanted all along.

There's a note from my dad on the refrigerator, hung by a magnet shaped like the state of Texas:

V
ERY, IF YOU SEE THIS, AND OF COURSE IF YOU ARE READING IT, YOU HAVE SEEN IT
: H
ELP
! A
ND
, H
ELLO
! I
WOULD LIKE TO WEAR MY WATCH TO THE GALLERY OPENING—THE ONE WITH THE COPPER FACE AND THE BROWN BAND—BUT
I
DON
'
T WANT TO WEAR IT TO THE OFFICE SINCE
I'
M GOING TO BE TYPING AND IT ALWAYS GETS IN THE WAY
. S
O
I'
LL TAKE IT OFF AND THEN, MORE THAN LIKELY
, I'
LL FORGET TO PUT IT BACK ON
. A
ND THERE
I
WILL BE AT THE OPENING, MY WRIST AS NAKED AS THE MODELS IN THE ART
DEPARTMENT
(
DO YOU KNOW THEY ARE PAID
$74
A SITTING
? W
HAT AN ODD NUMBER
!). A
T ANY RATE, ALL OF THIS IS TO SAY, WOULD YOU BE A PAL AND BRING THE WATCH FOR ME
, V
ERY
? S
INCERELY, YOUR FAVORITE FATHER,
D
ALLAS
.

A
DDENDUM
: I
T IS POSSIBLE THAT
R
AMONA OR
A
NNALIESE MIGHT FIND THIS NOTE
. O
R EVEN
I
MOGENE
. I
F THAT IS THE CASE, PLEASE BRING IT DIRECTLY TO
V
ERY
. D
O NOT PASS
G
O
. D
O NOT STOP FOR A SNACK IN THE PANTRY OR TO PICK A BOOK IN THE LIBRARY.
D
IRECTLY TO
V
ERY
. W
E ALL KNOW WHAT WILL HAPPEN OTHERWISE
. N
AKED WRIST AND NO
$74
FOR THE TROUBLE
.

I fold the note and put it in my pocket. With a final gulp, I finish my lemon-ish sparkling water and put the cup in the sink, then stop, go back, and put it in the dishwasher, since I'll be the one to load the dishwasher later anyway. Then I go get my dad's watch for him. It tick-tick-ticks with satisfying regularity, like a heartbeat, or soldiers marching onward, onward, onward, not caring where they go.

ii.

Twenty-seven minutes after we were supposed to have arrived, we are in the car.

We crank the AC and listen to mellow music on the way there, and for that bubble of time, it is like when we were little, and Mom and Nonnie would bustle us into the car and just drive. “We're going on an adventure,” they'd say. We'd leave Dad behind, working on his book about music—a different attempt each summer, it seemed. Sometimes the trip was just to the town pool or the beach. Often, though, it would be a real journey. We drove to the top of Mount Washington in Nonnie's roadster. It was so windy at the top that Mom's scarf blew into the air like a red keening bird. We went down to Boston to ride in the Swan Boats, gliding along the smooth water while tourists took pictures. Mom and Ramona pretended they were celebrities and the tourists were paparazzi. Once, we went to Bar Harbor to take the ferry to Nova Scotia, but were turned away because Ramona and I didn't have passports. It was the peak of summer and the only place available to spend the night was a cheap hotel on the wrong side of the bridge. I remember the sheets were rough and there was an awful smell of stale cigarettes. Now, though, now that Nonnie is so sick, the memory tastes like warm milk.

We pull into the parking lot and through the glass windows of the gallery I can see people moving around holding their wineglasses and their hors d'oeuvres on tiny napkins.

Mom steps out of the car, gorgeous in a floor-length
turquoise halter dress. She gives herself a once-over in the glass of the car window, touching her fingertips to her hair. I shoot a cursory glance in the rearview mirror, then emerge from the car into the wall of humidity. I've got on my black dress that came from some chain store in the mall, but, in a touch of sartorial creativity I'm quite proud of, I chose a pair of red ballet flats. Most of the time I wear my hair down, but it's so hot, and my hair is long and heavy, so I've twisted it into a bun. I think I look fairly cute, yet sophisticated. Perfect for a gallery opening? I never seem to get these things quite right.

Ramona looks like she is attending a different event entirely. She still has the Dinosaur Jr. shirt on, but swapped her cutoffs for a denim skirt. Long ago she embroidered a rainbow along the hem of the skirt, and now it looks dingy. She's thrown on a couple of strings of Mardi Gras beads in red, pink, and orange. I don't comment because I know that's just what she wants me to do. Or maybe she doesn't care. It's become so hard to tell.

Mom pushes open the glass doors and all eyes swivel to her. It is like they've been waiting for her arrival. Annaliese Woodruff and her two ladies-in-waiting. I bask in the refracted glow. A waiter walks by and offers her a flute of champagne, which she takes with a smile as she floats farther into the room.
Lovely to see you! And you! What a gorgeous dress! Kiss, kiss.

Mom is on sabbatical this year. She could've gotten the time off just to care for Nonnie, but in her application she promised the chair of the department that she'd create a series of paintings suitable for a gallery exhibition. Work on these, as far as I can
tell, is not exactly progressing.

This is the first opening without Nonnie. We usually go into these things together, muttering under our breath about the art and the pretentiousness of everyone there. “This is not how you experience art,” she would say. “And oh my, is Professor Ricci still trying to work that comb-over? What a sad, funny man.” She once told me that Gertrude Stein stole that famous line from her: “If you can't say anything nice about anyone else, come sit next to me.”

My phone buzzes and I pull it out of my pocket to see a text from my best friend Grace:
@ that gallery thing?

Sadly yes
, I text back.

Your assignment: Interview college boys. Find out if they are as woeful as their high school counterparts.

I scan the room full of art-department college boys in ironic T-shirts and faded jeans with chin-length hair and woven bracelets.
Field report: subjects potentially worse. Abort mission.

I expect a full report tomorrow morning. Graph and determine equation of awfulness if you must.

Hilarious.

Admit it. You're thinking about how to do it.

I was, but instead I type:
Over and out.
Mom doesn't like it when I'm on my phone at the gallery. She thinks it reflects badly on her.

I decide I'll look at the paintings, too. At least then I'll appear occupied. The only problem is that they are all more or less the same: a square of solid paint. They are different colors,
sometimes smaller, sometimes larger. Sometimes the canvas is also square, sometimes rectangular. None have frames, so the white edges of the canvas blend into the white of the wall.

“It really exemplifies our society, don't you think?” a middle-aged man asks me. “Always putting boxes around things, putting ourselves in boxes.”

“Of course,” I say. “Boxes, boxes everywhere.” I try to hide a smile, and look around for Ramona. She is on the far side of the room, sitting on a bench and staring at one of the paintings, perfectly still. We used to play this bingo game at the openings. First person to get to five art-gallery clichés won. It was usually her, picking up on the inane things people would say, the way the art students would argue that every painting was about sex or liminal space. Now Ramona is too far away to play the game with me, and anyway, she's not looking at anything but the artwork.