What My Sister Remembered (3 page)

My mother held up a lemon and a half. “Here,” she said breathlessly, “I can make you some.”

“Please don’t bother, Karen,” Aunt Helene said.

“It’s no bother at all.” My mother began frantically opening and closing the drawers of the cupboard as she searched for the juicer. We hardly ever squeeze lemons in my family.

“So—how was Europe?” my dad asked as my mother noisily moved things around.

“The weather was terrible,” Aunt Helene said, “especially in Paris. If you think it’s hot here—-it was just broiling there, and London-—I think it rained almost every day. It’s good to be back. Poor John is still in England. He has to give a few more lectures. Suddenly the whole world is interested in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American painters.”

“Is that so?” inquired my father, trying to look interested.

“Oh, yes!” Aunt Helene nodded her head up and down. “When he went into the field, there was absolutely no interest at all, and nobody wanted to publish his first book. "Now”—she took a tiny bite of the piece of bread in her hand—"now he has three major publishers trying to outbid each other for his next book.”

My mother found the juicer and began squeezing the lemon and a half.

“I don’t like any of the lemon pieces,” Beth said. “I like to have my lemonade strained.”

My mother stopped squeezing the lemons and began opening and closing the drawers of the cupboard again as she looked for the strainer. We eat the kind of meals in my house that don’t require juicers or strainers.

“Are you going right back to California?” my father asked.

“No. I thought we’d run up to Maine for a week or so. You know my sister and her family live there. We haven’t seen her since Christmas—she and the kids were out to see us then. We usually visit back and forth a couple of times a year. We’re very close.”

Beth and I looked at each other. I wondered if she was thinking the same thing I was thinking. In the eight years since we were separated, we hadn’t seen each other—not even once. Not that I had missed her, the way I sometimes do miss my brothers. But I’d always wanted to go to California and stay in Beth’s big, rich house and play with all her toys and see for myself if they really had five bathrooms.

“I don’t want to go to Maine,” Beth said.

My mother brought Beth her lemonade and placed it in front of her. She had filled one of the tall, fancy, pink glasses and set it down on a saucer. It looked delicious with the ice glistening inside it. My mother’s face was red and wet with perspiration. She stood there waiting as Beth picked up the glass, sipped it, made a face, and said, “It’s not sweet enough.” I noticed that Beth had a gold charm bracelet on her wrist with tiny little charms that quivered as she moved her arm.

“Well
...
” My mother hurried off to find the sugar bowl and set it down before Beth. “Here, Beth, just add some more sugar—as much as you like.”

“Sit down, Karen,” Aunt Helene urged. “Beth is fine. It was very sweet of you to go to all that trouble for her. At home she usually makes her own lemonade.”

I watched Beth add one
...
two
...
three teaspoons of sugar. She tasted her lemonade after each addition while my mother stood there, waiting. Finally, after the third teaspoon, Beth set down her spoon and began sipping. Then my mother sat down. Beth didn’t say thank you to my mother or smile at her. She just drank her lemonade with a sour face, and I decided that I didn’t like Beth.

“So—Karen, tell us about Alex’s wife. Her name’s Lisa, isn’t it?”

“She’s pregnant,” I said again.

“Will you stop that!” my mother snapped. She turned to Aunt Helene. “She’s  . . well
...
she’s very nice, I guess. Very intelligent.” My mother said the word
intelligent
in a way that meant she really didn’t think Lisa was intelligent. “They both met at college only
...
only now Alex had to stop and find a job. I mean since they got married.”

I could hear the bitterness in my mother’s voice. Alex is the smartest one of the three of us. A straight-A student all through school, and only a year to go before he would have finished college and gotten his degree in mathematics. We all expected him to go on to graduate school, but all of a sudden, he and Lisa decided to get married.

“He’ll go back,” my father said, trying to sound cheerful. “Maybe he can finish at night. It’s all right.”

“Alex also has a good singing voice, doesn’t he?” Aunt Helene asked.

“No, Mom, I keep telling you.” Beth put down her glass of lemonade. “Jeff is the one who sings. He’s older. He’s twenty-four, and Alex is twenty-one—only eight years older than I.”

“Oh, that’s right,” Aunt Helene said. “Well, Karen and Walter, I wish them both lots of luck, but I do agree with Karen that it’s better to finish your education before you marry. John and I waited until he finished his degree.”

I wanted to repeat that Lisa was pregnant and that was why they had to get married because Aunt Helene didn’t seem to understand. But my mother had a strained look on her face, so I kept quiet.

“Jeff had a beautiful voice,” Beth said. “He always said he was going to be a singer.”

“He still does,” my mother said grimly. “He always knew lots of songs.” Beth turned to me for the first time. “Does he still know lots of songs?”

“Oh, sure,” I told her. “He’s always coming up with new songs. He’s the only one in the family who sings. Nobody else can carry a tune.”

“I can carry a tune,” Beth said.

“Actually,  Beth has  a  lovely voice,”  her  mother said. “She’s quite a musician. You should hear her on the piano. Her teacher thinks she could be a professional if she wanted.” Aunt Helene laughed. “John and I love music, but neither of us has much talent. I studied piano for years, but I never could play as well as Beth.”

My mother cleared her throat. “Molly could have played too,” she began, but my father interrupted, shaking his head.

“She didn’t want to practice,” he said.

“Now, Walter,” my mother protested, “that’s not exactly true. You remember that was the year she had all those colds, and she just didn’t have the energy.”

“Nothing can stop Beth from practicing,” her mother said. “Even when she’s sick, she’ll get up and practice. I remember once when she had chicken pox
...
”

Aunt Helene went on and on, bragging about what a prodigy Beth was. I felt like throwing up. Beth was pretending to examine the little charms on her bracelet, and she was smiling. My sister was turning out to be a real drag.

My sister? It was hard for me to think of Beth as part of my family, I watched her pick up her lemonade and begin sipping it again. Even though she had the same dark eyes and the same dark skin and the same long nose—even though she looked kind of like me and my mom, and even though my mom was her aunt and my aunt too, and my brothers were her cousins and my cousins too—she didn’t feel like a part of my family.

Her mother stopped talking.

Beth looked at me suddenly and asked, “Are there still two beds in your room?”

“Two beds?”

“Well, you’re sleeping in Jeff and Alex’s old room, aren’t you?”

“Yes, now I am.”

“They used to have a trundle bed in their room, and sometimes when we slept over, we slept there, and the boys slept on the pullout couch in the living room. Do you still have that trundle bed?”

I looked over at my mom. Her face was pale and unhappy. I knew she must be thinking of how Beth chose to go with the Lattimores instead of staying with us. How she had her own big room in San Francisco instead of sharing my small bedroom and the trundle bed.

“Yes,” I said to her coldly, “I still have that trundle bed.”

Beth finished her glass of lemonade and stood up. “Let’s go see your room,” she said.

Her mother looked down at her watch and said, “Beth, we should be going soon.”

“Why?” Beth asked over her shoulder as she headed toward the door.

“We need to check in at the hotel. I said we’d be there before six.”

Beth turned. “Can’t you call from here and tell them we’ll be coming later?”

My mother cleared her throat. “Are you staying in the city tonight?” She had that nervous look, which meant she would have liked to invite them to stay over but was worried about where to put them.

“Actually,” said Aunt Helene, “we’ll be staying three or four nights. John wants me to meet with some of the publishers and also to check out a few museums
...
” Her voice drifted off. “We’ll probably take off for Maine next Tuesday or Wednesday.”

“Boring!” Beth said, standing in the doorway. I hate museums, and I hate Maine.”

“Now, darling,” her mother said, “maybe we can manage to go to a few concerts. It’s hard for Beth to be away from the piano for so long,” she said, turning to my parents.

“They don’t have a piano in Maine,” Beth said. “And the kids are a bunch of jocks. There’s nothing to do in Maine.”

“We’ll go swimming,” her mother said.

“The water’s too cold.”

“You’re just tired, darling, after the trip. Why don’t we go on to the hotel right now, and maybe you can take a nap.”

“I’m not tired,” Beth said, sounding very cranky, “and I don’t want to go to the hotel yet. I want to see Molly’s room. "You dragged me here. I didn’t want to come, but now that I’m here, you’re not letting me have any fun.”

Nobody else was having any fun either. It was embarrassing, the mean way Beth was talking to her mother. My mother got up and began shuffling the plates around, my Dad lit a cigarette, and I looked over at the window and tried to remember those curtains with the vegetables on them.

“Well, all right, Beth,” said Aunt Helene. “You go off with Molly for a little while. As long as it’s okay with your Aunt Karen and Uncle Walter, that is.”

“Absolutely,” my dad said.

“You’re sure we’re not taking up your time?”

“No, no, no!” my mother insisted. “We can just have something cool to drink while the girls play. Would you like some Coke or 7-up or
...
”

“Anything,” we heard Aunt Helene say as Beth and I moved out of the kitchen.

“Play!” Beth muttered. “She must think we’re two-year-olds.”

You’re acting like a two-year-old, I wanted to say, but I didn’t. She made me uncomfortable, and I couldn’t figure her out. Why was she so mean and nasty when she had so many things other people didn’t? I couldn’t understand her at all, but I did understand that her family was a lot richer than mine, that she got to go to places like France and England and Maine, that she lived in a big, wonderful house in San Francisco, and that her hair was short and moved in a beautiful curve whenever she shook her head. And her clothes— both her clothes and her mother’s clothes—were expensive, designer clothes that made me feel my mother and I were wearing rags. I felt angry and jealous and I wanted her to go away. She and her fashionable mother.

She moved quickly ahead of me down the hall to my room as if she knew exactly where it was. At the door she paused for a moment, looking around.

“It’s such a little room,” she said. “I forgot that it was so little.”

“It’s not so little,” I said.

“And you have a different spread on the bed. The boys had a dark blue one with a spot in the middle.”

“I picked out the spread,” I said proudly. “Mom
...
my mom ... let me pick it out last Christmas. It matches the curtains, and just a couple of months ago, my dad and I painted the room and put up the wallpaper.”

“Pink!” Beth wrinkled up her face. “All that pink! I hate pink.”

“Well, I like it,” I told her, but she was not listening.

She moved over to the bed and stood there, looking down at it. “Pull it out,” she ordered.

“Why should I?”

She didn’t answer. She just bent over, reached underneath, and pulled out the trundle bed. Then she looked around the room again. “It is a very small room,” she said.

“I don’t think it’s small,” I said angrily. “Maybe it’s not as big as your room, but it was plenty big enough for both of the boys, and it would have been big enough for
...
for
...
”

Beth suddenly dropped down on my bed. Not the trundle bed but my bed, right on top of my beautiful, frilly, pink spread.

“You’ve got your shoes on my spread,” I yelled.

She kicked them off and stretched herself. “I used to sleep here,” she said, “on this bed. I used to sleep here.”

“When did you ever sleep here?” I demanded.

“Then,” she said. “Before the accident. I slept on this bed, and you slept on the trundle bed.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Lie down,” she ordered. “Go ahead. Lie down.”

“No.”

She sat up and looked at me with a different kind of look. “Please, Molly, lie down. Please.”

“Okay, okay,” I grumbled. I lay down on the trundle bed. It was narrower than my bed but it was okay. “There’s nothing wrong with the trundle bed,” I said. “My friends sleep over all the time
.
”

“Good for them.”

I looked over at my pretty pink curtains. “I love pink,” I said.

"I hate it.”

“You keep saying you hate everything,” I told her angrily. “What do you like? Is there anything you like?”

“I like plenty of things,” she said. “But you have to be stupid to like everything the way you do.”

“I don’t like everything.”

“Okay—tell me what you don’t like.”

You, I wanted to say, you. But I held back, thinking, and while I did, Beth said, looking up at the ceiling, “There used to be another fixture on that light.”

“Yes,” I agreed, “a big, ugly one.”

“It looked like a saucer. I was just a little kid then but I remember it looked like a saucer, and I used to wonder what was inside it.”

“I picked this one out when we painted.”

She wasn’t listening. “I didn’t want to come today,” she said. “! never wanted to come back, even though my mom thought I should. But I can remember how we used to sleep over sometimes when our parents had a night out, and I used to love it then. The boys were so sweet—especially Jeff.”