The Almost Archer Sisters (10 page)

“Lou said, and I’ll never forget this, and he’s got his back to me the whole time, right, because he’s making me this cold steak sandwich in the kitchen, and he goes, ‘It’s a sad thing to be an angry man, Beau. But it’s a sin to make a boy feel your anger for you. You wanna get back at him, you just pick not to feel his anger, only your own.’ And man I never cried like … I was like a fricken baby in this house.”

“Why didn’t you ever tell me this?” I asked, freshly spooning his back, cupping under him with a little extra thigh.

“I hadn’t thought of it again. Much. I don’t know. Next day Lou helped me get my own place. It was so cool of him because Beth and I had broke up so I didn’t come around much, and it was way before us. Then, I don’t know, I stuck around here and it just … the anger faded, I guess. Then we got married and I made this family my family and I’ve been happy ever since.”

Beau stretched off and away from my tight clutch, pulling his whole body taut with a shudder to the ceiling, a knife to my spoon.

“It wasn’t a big deal, you know, him hitting me all the time. Slapping the back of my head like he did. Flicking at my ears and shit. But that night, that felt like he wanted me dead.”

I watched my husband’s profile, tears glistening in the valley of his eyes. Little sniffles echoed back and forth in the canyon between our bodies. He put a heavy hand on my stacked knees and we fell into an untroubled sleep. In the morning, Jake lay between us like something perfect we had made in the night. For a few seconds we both watched him dream in the nest of us. I remember feeling that if this is all that marriage is, then this is more than enough for me. Where did that feeling go?

T
HAT LITTLE EMAIL
exchange had given me the oddest kind of buzz, making it somehow easier to relax with the kids while waiting
for Beth’s call. She would be arriving home early that morning, and I had hoped she’d sleep off the jet lag and airplane scotch before digging into her laptop. Imagining her scanning the completed profile, and my back and forth with Marcus, gave me a touch of nauseous jealousy.

“Mom!” Jake screamed, running to the other end of the slippy slide. I reaimed the hose in a high urinal arch. He tugged up his heavy bathing suit, his hair spidering across his forehead.

“What?”

“I just can’t believe how much fun I’m having!”

“Me too, bud,” I said, beginning to understand how affairs can sometimes spruce up a lusterless marriage. A little funnel of joy began turning in my center, all because a handsome man I had never met thought I looked like Julie Christie.

The slippy slide kept ripping Jake’s trunks off before he could come to a stop in the wet grass. It was like he was being spat out of a boy factory over and over again, the same model, while Sam stood on the end to catch him.

I heard the phone ring inside and let Beau answer it.

“Here. It’s your
waaaa
,” Beau whispered, easing open the screen door and handing me the receiver. “She says her life’s
gaaaa
.”

“Keep them well watered,” I said, trading the hose for the phone. The screen door wheezed shut behind me. I crossed the kitchen and the living room and moved out to the front porch, feeling Beau’s eyes following me.

“What was that screaming?” Beth asked.

“The boys,” I said. “I have two.”

“Peachy. I just read your email exchanges.”

“First off. Welcome back.”

“Thanks. I feel sick. It’s like Marcus is totally in
love
with you. And what’s with you being a hundred thirty-five pounds? Jesus, I shaved off twenty.”

“That would make me emaciated.”

“No. That would make you a New Yorker.”

“And you don’t mean
me
, you mean Georgia,” I said. My chest swelled with something—pride, fear.

“I know, I know. But are you in front of your computer? Did you read his latest?”

“No. Read it to me.”

“Listen.
‘Dear Georgia, thank you so much for your sweet, odd reply. I was looking at your picture while reading it and thinking, Yup she does look like this kind of person—playful, intelligent, and warm.’
Peachy! I’m jealous. Is that weird?”

“Yes. ’Cause it’s Georgia, remember. Make-believe Georgia. Go on.” My face was now shot with red. I was angry, actually angry that she read our exchange, that she had accessed his response before I was able to.

“So. Okay. He goes:
‘And I hear you on the strangeness of Internet dating. I’m thirty-four. We’d barely heard of computers until I was about thirteen. But I’m not sure how I feel about purging all my past relationship secrets though. Why exchange sad stories before we even meet? Okay, I’ll tell you this much. My last girlfriend, we’ll call her B. We met at work, like millions of other people, and we dated for about six months, until about three weeks ago. You may think I’m putting myself out there too quickly, but I had one foot out the door for the past three months. I just didn’t have the heart to tell her.’
”

Beth’s voice cracked at these words.

“Oh, sweetie,” I said. “This is insane.” And it was. I felt like a cheater already. “Why don’t you just erase this message and kill the file? And I can’t see anything good coming from this.”

“Oh. So you don’t want me to finish reading what Marcus wrote to you?”

Yes
.

“No.”

Yes, I thought, more please.

“No? Well here goes anyway:
‘That said, B was a remarkable
woman. Fun, funny, and accomplished. But her problems are legion. And her ego large. You seem different, like you’re not looking for anything. Like if anything happens it’s a bonus in an already full life. Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking on my part. But that’s what I’m looking for in a friend or companion.’
”

Beth went quiet. Save for the sniffling, I would have thought she’d hung up on me.

“There you go. Your answer. We can close the file on this case now, right?”

“No way,” she said. “I want specifics. I want to know what I did wrong. I want to know what moment, three months ago, did he know I was not the girl for him. And I want to know why he strung me along.”

“Then talk to him, Beth. Call him in person.”

But she wasn’t listening to me. She was crying the same way she did when stuff was yanked from her hands as a kid. We are a family of criers. We cry to stave off death. We despair because we don’t want to store, shelve, hoard that kind of stuff inside of us.

“
Call him?
Oh, that’s funny. Yeah. I’ll call Marcus and let him know just how pathetic I really am. Here’s what I’ll say. I’ll call and I’ll say,
Hey Marcus, a little bird told me you wanted me out on my ass three months ago, but you felt sorry for me so you stuck around a little longer
… aaaaaaaaaaah! Peachy!”

“No. I’m done.”

“
Please? Peachy!
—just write him just one more note. Gently pry him one more time. I want to find out why he stuck around for three more months. And then maybe prod him about his commitment phobia.”

“But I don’t think he has commitment phobia, Beth. I think he could commit, wants to commit—but just to someone he’s probably a little more compatible with.”

“I can’t believe you’re defending him, Peachy. You don’t even
know him. And you don’t know how close we were. We practically lived together.”

“Jesus Christ, he took care of your fish.”

“What are you saying?”

“Nothing. I’m sorry. I know you’re heartbroken, Beth. And you must be tired from the flight.”

We were both quiet for a few seconds, like a couple of boxers tired of circling each other, though not quite ready to land a punch.

“I am tired.”

“Then sleep on it a little, okay? But I think we should stop this altogether, really. We’re too old for this kind of stupidity.”

I could hear the boys yelping out back, calling me to them.

“Fine. If you don’t write him back, Peach, I will. And I’ll tell him right off. How dare he tell a perfect stranger that I’m full of problems.”

“Beth, you’re insane. He was telling
me
.”

“He doesn’t know it’s you.”

“True. But he’s gonna know it’s you if you write him and tell him off. And then he’ll think you’re totally crazy. You can’t tell him, Beth.”

“I can.”

“Then do it,” I said.

Truthfully, I didn’t want her to kill Almost Me, not yet. And I felt terrifically, embarrassingly territorial about my burgeoning correspondence with Marcus. I wanted Almost Me to live a little longer, maybe because I liked the feeling of someone preferring me to Beth. I knew Beau loved me, but I had never lost that sense of being his consolation prize.

“I will. I will shut this down, Peachy. But after one more letter to him. I want to know.”

Beth threw down gauntlets so often it was a wonder she didn’t
have carpal tunnel syndrome. Fine, I’d always reply, go ahead. That’s how she put her car in a ditch, driving it home drunk instead of leaving it at Kaponi’s party where I waited for Lou to pick me up. That’s how I got the scar under my chin, after Beth dared me to jump off the roof of the farmhouse into the above-ground pool we once had. I said, “No way.” Beth said, “Step aside, chicken.” And that’s when I said, “Fine, I’ll jump.” And it was in the spirit of those ridiculous dares that I, instead of Beth, had been the one to find our mother that day.

“I don’t want to play this game anymore.”

“I’ve never asked you to help me before, Peachy.”

“Bullshit. You’re forgetting one or two very key moments from our childhood. But just this once, Beth, can you leave something alone? Just once can you not take something that’s already a bad idea and shove it over a fucking cliff?”

“No. I want to know.”

I exhaled.

“Okay. But let me write it. That way it won’t seem like two different insane people writing him. This is so fucked up. Are we really this fucked up?”

“What can I say? We had a rough childhood,” she said.

“You’re
still
having it,” I said, hanging up the phone. I listened to the gleeful shrieks coming from the back of the house. In the side yard, hearty reeds shot out of the willow stump and I thought about Nell, as I did every time I stared at that goddamn willow stump, its roots we kept meaning to yank up for good.

B
ETH ONCE TOLD
me she knew our mother was going to kill herself. She said it was a fact to her long before it happened, something she was merely waiting to see with her own eyes. We all knew Nell was depressed, but her depression wasn’t just a part of her, inside of her. It hovered like a fifth family member, greedily taking up space, stealing oxygen from the rooms, occupying furniture, hoarding food.

The day she killed herself, I had been feeling sick, but I preferred to stay on the office cot until the lunch bell. Later, I learned that kids with mothers like ours, kids whose survival mechanisms were still intact, instinctively knew how to seek care elsewhere. I liked how the nurse touched my forehead with her cool, concerned hand. How she smelled mothery, like bread and coffee. At lunch Miss Brant told Beth to fetch me at the nurse’s station, where I sat wilted over like a top-heavy flower, and take me home so I
didn’t spread my virus. They had tried to call Nell, but there was no answer. Beth convinced them that she was probably just outside, so she half-carried me back to the farm, taking the shortcut along the tracks. We stopped at the Starlite Variety, but the idea of anything sweet made me reel. I waited for Beth outside while she took her good old time picking out penny candy.

“If I get sick on the way home, it’s your fault,” I said when she finally sauntered out. She just shrugged, then dug deeper into her little paper bag, dramatically popping candy into her mouth.

At the house I couldn’t wait to get away from her. I took the steps in twos, while Beth shuffled off her shoes in silence, enjoying the last of her marshmallow bananas. Nell’s car was in the driveway, but we didn’t hear her in the house. That was not surprising. We often found her napping instead of cooking or cleaning or buzzing around the house the way that other mothers did. But this time the rooms felt cryptic, tomby. Beth stood in the bathroom archway, unsure about Nell’s whereabouts, while I sat on the toilet, completing a bit more relief. It seemed neither one of us wanted to be alone. Then we spotted the envelope on the console in the hall with “Lou” neatly written on the front. Beth opened it and read it aloud.

My blood felt bubbly, like hot Pepsi had entered my veins. I soundlessly followed Beth to the side yard, where the willow loomed like a fat, strung-out ghoul, hair full of dreads and bugs.

“Don’t go up there,” I said, looking up the ladder.