Nearer Than the Sky (6 page)

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Authors: T. Greenwood

Tags: #Fiction, #Contemporary Women, #Family Life, #Psychological, #General

BOOK: Nearer Than the Sky
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L
ily has always been prettier than I am. I knew this from the time that I could differentiate her reflection from my own in the cracked mirror in the bathroom. Before I had the words, I knew that she was
beautiful
and that I was
plain.
But this was before I understood the implications of my plainness. Before I understood that despite attempts at fairness, parents are bound to love their beautiful children more. That homely children are not touched in the same way that their more attractive siblings are. That tenderness has less to do with love than with the softness of skin or with large blue eyes and cupid’s-bow lips.
Even now as I watched Lily making dinner, I found myself making the usual comparisons, categorizing the differences between us. Hair, eyes, the gentle curve of her shoulder or wrist. Lily’s thick blond hair was pulled up and tethered by a velvet scrunchy. Her neck long and her skin pale. Even at twenty-nine and only eight months after Violet was born, her body was still long and straight like a boy’s. Her bones were small, like a bird’s. Her eyes were so large and deep-set, they might be startling to someone who wasn’t so familiar with the intricacies of her face.
“Do you still eat meat?” Lily asked without turning away from the counter.
“Gawd yes,” I said. The Swan was mostly vegetarian (that was the latest trend in town) but Peter and I were absolutely rabid when it came to a good steak.
Lily, like my mother, has always been a good cook. I remember my mother’s futile attempts to teach me. It wasn’t that I didn’t like to; it was just that I was so easily distracted. She gave up when I first swore I’d remember and then promptly forgot to check on a tuna casserole we were making. She found me lying on my stomach watching TV nearly two hours after I was supposed to take it out. I remember her standing there with oven mitts on and the room smelling of burnt tuna. She dumped the whole thing into the garbage and never let me help her in the kitchen again.
But Lily loved to be in the kitchen with Ma. She even had a miniature apron that Ma had made with purple and white checks, purple rickrack trim, and a pocket shaped like a heart on the front. Lily made little loaves of bread and little pies. Daddy almost always ate at the bar, but on Saturdays Lily would present him with some sort of casserole or meat on a TV tray so that he could watch basketball and eat at the same time. I’d curl up next to him on the couch and we’d eat while Lily watched to make sure that he was enjoying it.
Tonight, the ingredients were more expensive. The pots and pans not the kind we had growing up: copper instead of the burnt-bottom stainless steel ones in Ma’s kitchen. Lily’s appliances were cleaner and shinier. Black espresso maker, pasta maker, Cuisinart. None of them looked like they had ever been used.
“Do you want a hand?” I asked Lily. She had finished making the marinade for three thick red steaks and was peeling potatoes.
“No thanks,” she said.
“I’ve gotten better,” I said. “Peter’s been teaching me how to bake.” I thought about the plastic containers in the bakery clearly marked
Wet
and
Dry.
I didn’t have to do too much besides mix them together and then add berries or bananas to the mix. I don’t know why they never seemed to come out right. “He still does all of the cooking, though.”
“Why don’t you open a bottle of wine or something?”
“Sure,” I said. I needed something to do with my hands. I also needed a drink. “Red or white?”
“We’re having steaks, so how about a Merlot?”
I glanced quickly at a row of wine bottles in a beautiful wrought-iron wine rack on the counter until I found the word
Merlot
on one of them. I removed it carefully from the rack and Lily handed me a corkscrew. We never had wine in our house growing up. Daddy drank beer, and when Ma drank, it was always bourbon.
“I’ve never been very good at this,” I said. “But let me give it a shot.”
I twisted the corkscrew and then started to press down on the silver arms like wings. The cork promptly dropped into the bottle. Pungent wine splashed into my face and on my T-shirt. “Shit,” I said. “Sorry.”
Lily turned away from the potatoes. “It’s okay,” she said, grabbing a sponge from the sink and wiping furiously at the counter top. Long after all of the wine had been soaked up, Lily kept running the sponge across the smooth granite surface. She made one last swipe and tossed the sponge into the garbage bin under the sink.
“I’m really sorry,” I said.
“It’s okay. I’ll open another one. Are you hot?” She went to the wall and adjusted the air conditioner. I felt a cold gust of artificial air blow across the back of my neck. Then she gracefully and silently pulled the cork from another bottle of Merlot and poured me a glass. I took a long swallow and felt the wine warming me against the chill in the air.
Rich came home just as I was about to sneak upstairs and find a sweater in one of Lily’s closets. Lily met him at the door and ushered him past Violet, who had finally fallen asleep, into the kitchen.
“Indiana Jones,” Rich said and hugged me. I have always liked Rich. He reminds me a lot of Daddy. His family is from Boston, hard workers. He went straight to work after high school for his dad’s construction company. He worked his way up until he was foreman and then when his dad died, he and his brother took over. He opened up the Phoenix branch of the company to be near Lily. He and Lily met on a cruise that he took his mother on after his father’s funeral. The story of how they met is one of those stories that makes me think of a photo spread in one of the magazines Lily read when she was in junior high and I was in high school. It is dimensionless. Colorful and smiling, but flat and glossy. Forgettable. He simply saw her sipping on a piña colada at the end of an outdoor bar and thought she looked like an angel. He told her so, and one year later he had relocated to Phoenix and they were on the same ship on their honeymoon. It makes me laugh to remember how Peter and I met when I hear stories like these. The story of how we fell in love is more like the crackly black-and-white films that Peter shows at the theater than the pink, lavender, blue of Lily and Rich’s romance.
“When did you get in?” Rich asked and pulled a beer out of the refrigerator.
“This morning.”
He popped the top off and just as he was about to set it on the counter, Lily glared at him, and he scooted past her to put the cap in the trash. Lily was amazing. When Peter and I moved from our apartment into the cabin, I found about a hundred bottle caps underneath cushions and behind books on shelves.
“Have you been by the hospital yet?” he asked.
I shook my head. I watched Lily stiffen.
“Rich, can you get the candleholders out?” she asked. The steak crackled under the broiler. Lily emptied a pint of sour cream into the bowl of potatoes.
Rich smiled at me and squeezed my shoulder. He handed me the candleholders, which I arranged in the center of the table, and he set down three plates from Lily’s china cabinet. They were white with the faintest raised flowers at the center. I couldn’t imagine her letting red meat touch these plates.
“You’re driving her up to Mountainview?” Rich asked.
“Yeh,” I smiled. “I am
not
looking forward to it, either.”
Rich has been in our family long enough to know about Ma’s tendencies toward drama. I’ve always been able to count on Rich as an ally when Ma did this kind of thing. While Lily cried into her hands or took Ma into another room to calm her down, Rich and I would smoke cigarettes in Ma’s backyard. We’d been through this before.
“Better not leave her alone when you stop for gas.” Rich chuckled softly. “She might get thirsty.”
I stifled a laugh. It felt good to make fun. It made this less absurd. Less insane.
Lily turned around. Her face was red, the platter of steaks was trembling in her hands. I concentrated on the meat so that I wouldn’t laugh.
“Just kidding.” Rich shrugged. “Sorry.”
“How’s the company doing?” I asked quickly.
“Great. Summer’s over, so the guys are happy.You’d never believe what a difference there is between a hundred-fifteen degrees and ninety degrees.”
“I can imagine,” I said.
Rich lit the candles with a lighter from his pocket. When Lily reached into the fridge for the butter, he pretended to suck out the lighter fluid.
Lily turned around and saw him. She slammed the mashed potatoes on the table. “Enough!”
She sat down and put her napkin in her lap. I watched her eyes brim with tears and then spill. She didn’t move her hands to her face to stop them.
“This looks great,” Rich said and reached for her hand.
Lily stared at her plate.
He cut into his steak. Red juice spilled out from the middle. He speared a thick pink piece and put the whole thing in his mouth. “It
is
great.”
Lily wiped quickly at the tears and smiled at him weakly.
Then, in the other room Violet’s chest rumbled and I watched Lily’s glance dart quickly toward the living room. She lay her fork across the plate and strained her neck to listen. She stayed like this until the danger of another explosion seemed to have passed.
 
I feigned jet lag so that I wouldn’t have to stay inside that cold living room after Lily had started the dishwasher and blown out the candles.
“You sure you don’t want some bread pudding?” she asked, scooping a warm spoonful of our mother’s bread pudding into a glass bowl. “It’ll help you sleep.”
“Nah,” I said. “I’m pooped.”
“I just made up the bed,” Lily said. “Ma was the last one to stay here.”
I followed her up the stairs, noting how she walked on the balls of her feet as she passed by the living room.
“Night, Rich,” I said, peeking in at him. He was sitting on the couch next to Violet’s bassinet, flipping through the channels. He was still wearing his work clothes. His tie was loosened, though, and he had slipped off his loafers. He had a new beer on the coffee table, resting carefully on one of Lily’s marble coasters.
“Night, Indie,” he said softly. “Sleep tight.”
“Shh . . .” Lily said, pointing at Violet and shaking her finger.
Lily showed me to the guest room and waved her hands around, gesturing to everything I might need. “There are clean towels in the closet, extra blankets and pillows. If you get hot you can adjust the air here. I usually keep it at 65 degrees. I’ve been sleeping downstairs with Violet, so if you need anything, come get me.You might wake up in the middle of the night if you’re jet lagged. Help yourself to some of the bread pudding. I don’t sleep much, so you won’t wake me up.”
“Jeez, Lily, stop. I’ll be fine. Thank you.”
She looked flustered, and then she peered toward the open door.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” she said.
“Is this about dinner?”
“I’m
fine.
” She pulled back the blanket and fluffed the pillow.
“Thanks,” I said, yawning.
“There are more blankets in there,” she said, suddenly irritated. “Sleep tight.”
After she left, I lay down on the hard bed. The walls, even in the darkness, were bright, reflecting the street lamp outside. The sheets were crisp to the point of being uncomfortable. I imagined Lily spraying them with starch and ironing them stiff and flat. I closed my eyes and concentrated on the noises of this house. I missed the sound of the woods. The sound of Peter breathing and the smell of a fire burning in the next room. Above me, the ceiling fan spun the stagnant air. And beyond that, I could hear the whirring of the dishwasher, the whirring of the air conditioner, the whirring of their hushed voices indistinguishable from the voices on the TV. I fell asleep listening to the sound of oxygen being forced into Violet’s lungs.
 
I woke up in the middle of the night to a familiar sound. It sounded like branches tapping against the windows of the cabin during a storm. I reached first for Peter and then, remembering where I wasn’t, sat up disoriented and blinked my eyes until they focused in the dark room. The sound was coming from outside, but there were no trees in Lily’s yard. There was only a cactus, and gravel scattered to fill the spaces where grass should be.
I got out of bed, covered my shoulders with a blanket, and walked down the hallway. The thick carpeting on the stairs was soft on my feet, different from the cold wooden floors of the cabin. But at least the floors at home were solid. I felt as if I might sink into the carpet here, that I might easily be swallowed in the creamy pile.
There was a soft light coming from the living room. I thought Lily might be feeding Violet, that I might be intruding. I was afraid I might have stumbled into that hour of night when Lily and her baby were the only ones awake in the house. It was difficult to imagine Lily cradling Violet in her arms, though. Even in pregnancy Lily had lacked that certain indescribable quality I have always equated with motherhood (the slight blush of a cheek, the certain swell and softness of the body). Leigh Moony’s face was already beginning to turn that particular shade of blush, even just a couple of months into her pregnancy. Her bones were not so angular anymore. But Lily had retained her pale cold skin and sharp angles throughout. I saw her once in the early months when I came out for one of Ma’s false alarms. Then later, after Violet was born and Lily brought her to Maine. By then the small swell of her breasts had already disappeared; she’d let her milk dry up, opting for the cans of formula and clean glass bottles instead. I had noticed after dinner that her dish rack was full of sterilized glass bottles and rubber nipples.

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