After Her (4 page)

 

Chapter Five

O
nce, when she was seven or eight, Patty was walking home—just wandering around the neighborhood, looking for dogs probably. It was one of those rare afternoons when, for some reason, I wasn't around. For Patty, spending an afternoon without me was like the sky doing without the sun.

As she told me later, she noticed a basketball lying on the ground near the playground. It had rolled into some bushes, but she could still make out the faded orange surface and the last few letters of the word
Wilson
. She walked over to investigate.

The ball was a little flat, but usable. She picked it up. Checked to see if the ball could still bounce. It did.

That was the beginning for my sister. I doubt Patty had ever even held a basketball before that day. Now, for the first time, she had, and once she did, she liked the feeling.

There was a patch of blacktop nearby. At one end was a pole with a hoop attached. No net, and the backboard was a little off-kilter. Patty started dribbling and aimed the ball at the hoop. It didn't go in on the first try, she told me. But after that, yes. Many times. Later, she dribbled the ball all the way home.

The next day we went over to Helen and Tubby's. Tubby had been a school custodian before he retired—meaning he owned every tool known to man, including an air pump and the needle you need for inflating a basketball. Once the ball was filled with air, Patty's dribbling got even better.

Later she mastered dribbling behind her back and through her legs. She mastered crossovers and balls-against-the-wall. Other kids noticed and asked her to play with them. On the court my sister was nimble and fearless, and surprisingly aggressive for a girl who, off the court, seldom spoke up or made waves. When she was shoved to the ground, which sometimes happened, she never betrayed any sign that it hurt, though it must have.

But Patty's greatest gift with a basketball was her shooting. Right before she made a shot she would freeze dead in her tracks. Just seconds earlier, her body had been tearing up and down the court so fast it was hard to keep track of her; now, about to take a shot, she stood stock-still, spring-loaded. Then she would look up, lock her eyes on the back of the rim, and with a brief glance to the right or left, she would release the ball, keeping her gaze on that rim until the moment the ball swished through the hoop and scored her points. Then she was off again.

Kids wanted my sister on their team when they saw her. Even boys did, if they were smart. And one more thing about Patty: Even though she was such a star on the court, she never hogged the ball. She appeared to feel no requirement that the points her team scored be hers. She was a true team player. But she was probably never happier than when she was alone on a court, as she was that first day, when it was just her and the ball, dribbling and shooting. That was the sound that let me know my sister was coming—the sound of a basketball hitting the pavement. Steady as a heartbeat.

I
SPENT ALL OF SEVENTH
grade waiting for the blood to come. Other things must have been going on that year, but that's how I remember it. Waking up and sliding my hand under my pajama bottoms to check if anything had happened in the night, moving it over my belly, my two new breasts—hard little mounds—and the soft place where a small tuft of pubic hair had sprouted, but there was nothing more.

As far as I knew I was the only girl in my class who hadn't gotten her period yet. Nobody said this. I'd figured it out by process of elimination, based on all the girls who talked about their cramps, or stood around the Tampax dispenser, exchanging stories about accidents or pool parties they had to navigate, wearing a cover-up. I alone had none to tell.

The fact that I, alone of the girls I knew, had not begun to menstruate obliterated all else as summer approached and I passed my thirteenth birthday. Ever since school started the fall before, I'd been carrying a sanitary napkin in my book bag. I lived in fear of being one of those girls we'd all known, who stands up to go to the blackboard to write out a theorem, and they've got this red spot on the back of their skirt. Maybe, if she's got a good friend, someone says something to her later. More likely people just whisper and stare.

My sister said she hoped it wouldn't ever happen to her—meaning getting her period, not the accident part. Good luck with that, I told her. But I had started to worry that it never would happen to me. I'd be the one girl in the history of our school who got all the way to graduation without ever seeing that gash of red in her underpants.

It was an odd thing to hope for. Who would want blood dripping out of them? Gushing out possibly, I wasn't even clear.

Only I did want it. Because everyone else had that happen to them, and it gave you something to share with the other girls. I was different enough as it was, without this. I figured if I could stand around the Tampax dispenser holding my stomach, complaining about cramps, I might fit in with the rest of them. Instead, all I did was carry around that same unopened sanitary napkin that had been lying in the bottom of my book bag so long now it had sandwich crumbs and bits of melted chocolate bar stuck to the wrapper, ballpoint pen marks, and lint. Checking my underpants every time I went to the bathroom. Finding nothing. Feeling like a freak, though hardly for the first time.

Our mother was not the sort of person you discussed these things with, but she had to know. She did our laundry.

Our father, when he touched down to see us, had started treating me differently, as if I was breakable. With Patty, he'd roughhouse—pat her on the butt, toss her a basketball, never mind if it hit her in the stomach, because she'd just laugh if it did, pick her up (tall as she was) and twirl her. With me he displayed a new and unfamiliar distance that sometimes made me feel as if he didn't even know me anymore.

It must have unnerved my father to think of me entering into the territory of sex. He knew how to act with little girls, and I knew—Patty and I both did, from all those times at Marin Joe's, and every other place we ever went with him—that he definitely knew how to act with a woman. How to be with a daughter who was no longer a child might have left him at a loss—a rare state for our father to find himself in, but it seemed this was so.

The only person I talked with about this was my sister. She was the only one I talked with about anything real, same as I was the only one for her.

Nights in bed (Patty top bunk, me bottom) we listened to music on our transistor radio and our tinny portable record player (Peter Frampton, Cat Stevens, Linda Ronstadt; the wilder stuff like Led Zeppelin and Lynyrd Skynyrd reserved for daytime).

We whispered to each other for hours, and it seemed there was no topic we couldn't discuss: What would Patty choose if our mother suddenly allowed us to have a dog: an adorable puppy or an old rescue dog that really needed a home? What happened to your body when you died? And—after seeing
Jaws
—whether we'd want to go on living if a shark bit off our legs and arms. (Or where we'd draw the line. Two legs, one arm? Both legs? One arm, one leg? We considered every possible variation.)

We discussed God (I didn't believe in him; Patty did) and our parents' divorce—though that was long ago now. Knowing he wasn't with us, and he lived alone, we speculated about what our father did those times he wasn't at the Civic Center working on one of his cases. Though he never talked about this, even when we asked, he definitely seemed like the type to have a girlfriend, and if he did, we knew she must be beautiful. One name stuck in my head, but I didn't ask about her. If our father wanted to say something, he would, and meanwhile it felt disloyal to our mother to speak it out loud.

Our mother's story contained little mystery. Since the divorce she had inhabited a deep, irretrievable place of cold, gray sadness, as if our father's departure from her life had banished all that remained of sunlight. We never questioned that she loved us, but her behavior suggested that of a person suffering from some contagious disease, who knows she might contaminate the people she loves if she gets too close to them. She brought home groceries after work from her job as a typist (the term
secretary
implying more status than she afforded herself) and took us shopping for school clothes when she could, but more than any children we knew, we were left to our own devices much of the time, with a mostly empty refrigerator and too-tight sneakers, saltines and cheese slices or canned soup for dinner, and a faint smell of smoke coming from the crack under her door to let us know she was in there with one of her library books.

But our father's story was more complicated. There was the mysterious Margaret Ann (whose name our mother cried out on the last night our father ever lived at our house; then never again).

Then there were all the others. Patty and I would be out with him, and some woman we'd never met would call out to him or come over to us, and there'd be this look between them that made us feel she knew all kinds of things we didn't.

After, I might ask who that was, and he'd say, “Someone I met one time.” He might mention that she worked at a flower shop he stopped at (buying flowers for someone else, more than likely), or at the dealership where he got the Alfa serviced, or she sold him a pair of boots a few months back. One time it was the judge in a case in which he'd testified. But the way she'd looked at him in the parking lot outside the gas station where we'd seen her—rearranging her hair, or that thing they all seemed to do, touching their neck—made her seem like a woman more than a judge.

“I don't see what's the big deal about sex,” Patty said one time. The teenage daughter of a family down the street, on Patty's paper route, had made the comment to my sister that our father was sexy. This led to a discussion of what made a person sexy, and from there, to things people did in bed together, as I understood it. Not our mother, but other people. Our father, definitely.

Why would anybody think that was fun? she said. It sounded dumb to her. She'd rather play basketball.

I couldn't say exactly why, but I definitely knew people cared a lot about sex. Supposedly, it made them feel very good, though it made them do crazy things too. This was how I saw it at the time. I figured I might understand better once I got my period. Only the months passed and it never came, and things reached the point where the sanitary napkin I'd been holding on to got so ratty I threw it out, and I didn't even bother putting another one in my book bag to replace it.

O
UR FATHER HAD MANY SECRETS.
The recipe for his special marinara sauce that he promised to divulge when I turned twenty-one. The places he'd take us on our weekend afternoons with him. (“You'll see,” he said, as he buckled us in the front. “You just can't tell your mother.”) His famous talent for getting criminals to confess their crimes, and how he knew if we were sad or scared, or that some boy at school made fun of my sister's teeth, before we ever told him. There was his gift for making spiders out of our hair of course. All this contributed to our belief that our father was magic.

We lived for those afternoons when the Alfa pulled up in front of our house—or possibly, if he was on a job, his unmarked car from the sheriff's department, which meant he'd have a gun strapped to his ankle, and a radio on his belt—and for the next hour and a half, if he took us out to eat, or maybe just ten minutes, if that's all he had time for, it was as if the whole sky lit up, and I was so happy my chest could have burst, and we laughed so much our faces hurt.

In the car, he always had an eight-track on. If it was Sinatra, he just listened. (Who'd sing along with Frank?) But when it was Dean Martin, our father would join in, English or Italian, it didn't matter. “Mambo Italiano” . . . “Ritorna-Me” . . . “Send Me the Pillow You Dream On”
. . .
And our favorite
:
“That's Amore.”

Our father knew all the lyrics, of course, and probably Patty and I did too, we'd heard them so many times, but we let him be the one to sing them.

When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie . . .

“That's amore!” Patty yelled, in that big voice of hers.

When the stars make you drool like a pasta fazool . . .

“That's amore!”

After a while, we'd make up our own lyrics:

When your pants start to itch, like a bug's in your crotch . . .

That's amore!

When you're sore in your heart, and you think you might fart . . .

That's amore!

We sang all the way home, and we'd still be singing when his car pulled in the driveway.

“You girls,” he said, scooping us up. “Loves of my life.”

Then he was gone, the last notes from the eight-track fading away as he turned the corner toward the highway, and there we were, just sitting on the curb again, watching his car disappear down the street like a flash of heat lightning.