The Almost Archer Sisters (12 page)

“Nana Beecher.”

“June, stop saying stuff like that, she’s just little. You’re scaring the heck out of her.”

“Lou Archer, I cannot tell what my daughter saw in you. Now Beth, you come over here and give your Nana a kiss. I don’t mean to make you depressed.”

Beth collected herself and walked over to the coffee table, where I was bent over a coloring book. She regarded my work with phony awe, gently lifted and dropped one of my anemic braids. Then Lou and I watched as Beth moved closer to her intended target, lifted up then cut off Nana Beecher’s long blond braid with one metal bite of the scissors. There was a split second where Lou could have stopped Beth had he really believed she was going to do it, which he did not.

“There!” Beth screamed, dropping the braid and the pinking shears on the table next to my book. I stared at the long tail of hair which must have represented at least twenty years of this old woman’s life. I was only six, but even then I was quite aware that this thing was much, much older than me. And there it lay cruelly detached from its maker’s head.

“What in the fuck!” Lou yelled, trying to propel himself off his saggy chair. He never swore at us like that.

Nana Beecher struggled to stand up too, but it was as though losing her hair had somehow affected her balance. She grabbed her
braid with one hand, Beth’s arm with the other, and yanked her out of the living room. Beth tried to sink to the floor, to make herself too heavy to drag, but Nana Beecher moved with the strength of a lioness carrying a limp jackrabbit in her jaw. Lou followed them out to the yard, and I followed Lou, nervously putting the ends of my braids in my mouth.

“Lay a hand on her, old woman, and I will lay a hand on you!” Lou yelled, keeping a slight distance from Nana Beecher, who still gripped one of Beth’s arms. She raised her other hand at the ready for a slapping.

“Are you threatening me with bodily harm on my property, Lou Archer?”

“It is not your property. You gave it to Nell, who gave it to me. Now you let go of my daughter right now and leave this farm.”

“This child is sick, Lou. Sick, damaged, and angry. If you don’t beat it out of her now, she’ll grow up rotten and spoiled and depressed like Nell. You mark my words, mister. Nell was just like this, and I shoulda been a lot harder on her when I had the chance. Running away like that. Making me look like I had done something wrong. Getting herself knocked up—not by one but by two feckless men. Wandering around with dirty hair, the neighbors said. Years like that and you didn’t tell me. And then she goes and takes those pills and I swear, I don’t know. I just don’t know what I did wrong. I just don’t know why this all happened to me,” she said, the geyser of tears shocking her more than us.

Finally, she let go of Beth and daubed her wet face with her braid. Then she flung it into the high grass and stomped back into the house. Beth remained crouched in a ball, flinching slightly when Lou tried to approach. Maybe she thought he’d finish the throttling, but instead he scooped her up and carried her onto the porch, dropping her on the wicker swing.

“Stay outside, both of you,” he said. “Keep an eye on Peachy.” Then he disappeared into the house. We braced ourselves for more
yelling, but it remained dead quiet inside. I was too afraid to talk to Beth, to find out what she had been thinking when she cut off Nana Beecher’s hair. I left her on the porch swing, arms wrapped tight around her torso. From there she watched me comb through the grass looking for the lost braid.

Twenty minutes later, Nana Beecher burst out the front door holding two of her suitcases. Lou followed behind carrying the rest. Neither of them spoke as they packed up the car, putting some of the suitcases in the trunk, the others in the back seat. Her remaining hair had fanned out into an uneven bob, which looked quite lovely, actually, more age-appropriate than those ridiculous buns.

“Peachy, come here, dear, and say goodbye to me,” she said, her voice hoarse with pride.

I became aware of the downside of being the favorite, how things could turn disastrous when the person who put you on the pedestal suddenly crumbled herself. I looked toward Lou, who stood leaning against the carport, placing his body between Nana Beecher and Beth. He nodded for me to meet her at the car, so I did.

“Peachy, how would you like to come live with me in Florida?” she asked, bending over to take my wrists in her hands. She spoke loud enough for Beth and Lou to hear. “Would you like that someday soon?”

I still can’t imagine why she thought she’d get a different answer out of a six-year-old. Especially one who had only lost her mother a few months earlier. And though I did feel a certain tug toward Nana Beecher, I would have felt that way toward a cow or a bush or even a large piece of furniture if it had given me any solace.

“No, I wouldn’t like that,” I said. “I want to stay here.”

“Well then,” she said, straightening up and smoothing down her shirt. “You think about it some more, okay?”

I nodded, then ran to Lou and took his hand. She climbed into
her car and without saying another word to Beth, she backed out of the driveway, honked once, and drove off.

I might have begun to hate Beth for scaring off the first of many people at least partially devoted to my happiness. But when Nana Beecher’s car disappeared into the horizon, Beth’s face went ashen, then completely slack, then her whole body rolled forward off the swing, fainting into a pile on the porch from the pain of clutching a broken ulna to her chest.

E
VERY YEAR FOR
about ten, Nana Beecher would send a Christmas or birthday card, addressed to me, stuffed with a twenty-dollar bill and an invitation to visit Florida. (“I’ll pay for the ticket. You can fly by yourself and I’ll meet you at the airport,
Peachy
.”) Whenever I asked about taking the trip, Lou would say, “Later, another time, when you’re older.” Then he’d file the cards away, urging me not to tell Beth, imploring me to buy something for Beth when I rode my bike into town to spend the money. Poor Beth, he’d say, adding that the wrath of that old woman was a rotten thing to visit upon such a troubled head. Then he’d tell me to pray for Nana Beecher, but mostly, he said, pray for Beth to not absorb any of Nana Beecher’s awful words or deeds.

Soon after, memories of my mother started to fade by the day, by the hour. Suddenly, I’d forget her middle name, or that she was afraid of dogs, or what her favorite color was, and I’d have to look hard for something of Nell’s to smell or touch to bring her back, hiding these attempts from Beth, my only female constant in the house.

At first Lou could only awkwardly mimic the way his wife had tried, and his mother-in-law had excelled at, running the house efficiently. He’d stiffly organize our arms and legs into flannel pajamas pulled straight out of a hot dryer. He’d carefully comb
out the knots on our wet heads, cultivating a future affinity for playing with hair. The soundtrack of those early days was always an AM radio playing something soothing and country on the kitchen counter, Beth’s crying and yelling turning to talking and humming, something awful in her temporarily lifting. For a few years we lived in a peace-filled, drowsy diorama, until Beth’s legs began swinging off the crusty vinyl kitchen chairs with a newfound angsty rhythm.

B
EING RAISED BY
a man did not stunt our femininity; in fact, it brought out Lou’s as he fell in love with fixing our hair, a skill that did not go unnoticed by other mothers and their daughters. I was never jealous of the few women who came around to get their hair done, who tried to hold Lou’s gaze as he administered perms, or cut a straight set of bangs, all while marveling at our house with its acres of brush and big airy rooms, marveling at these motherless girls before them.
Oh, you poor things
, their eyes would say. Got no mom to clean this big old house, with two bathrooms, carport, mortgage fully paid for, no doubt, in this blue-collar town full of divorced drunks, deadbeat fathers, and unemployed jerks. And we knew if they reached for Beth’s cheek or her hair with that look on their faces, their coats would mysteriously appear strung between two fingers. This was followed by a quick ride home to their rental over the florist’s, or wherever they shared space with their own brats, or absentee husbands, or lazy roommates, Beth and I watching them from the passenger seat we’d scramble into, always making them take the back seat. I’d turn and wave weakly while Lou pulled fast away. Another one bites the dust, Beth would say, and it would be just us for a great long stretch.

After Lou decided his affinity for hair was a God-given skill, he went to school in Windsor for nine months of training. He
found us a live-in sitter named Teresa Tran, a Vietnamese refugee who spoke very little English, so we never got the whole story, just bits about a farm she grew up on and the war that killed her dad and two brothers. Lou tried to explain to Teresa that he was a draft dodger, an almost Vietnam vet, pointing to his chest as though he expected her to pin something shiny to it. She just smiled and nodded. Despite her size, she also proved to be a formidable wood splitter, often joining the men helping Lou clear the brush where he would drop the trailer for his riverside hair salon.

I loved Teresa Tran, secretly hoping Lou would marry her and keep her on the farm, even though she wasn’t more than nineteen, maybe twenty. I couldn’t keep my hands out of Teresa’s heavy horse-tail hair. I would touch her slanted eyes, too, and try to make mine go like Teresa’s, pulling the outside corners of my eyes to my temples and fastening the skin with Scotch tape, leaving it like that overnight. Teresa would alchemically conjure her own dinners, the textures and smells Beth might have had the bravery to try, but not the generosity. She’d make Beth salty egg salad sandwiches, fish sticks, and corn on the cob. For herself and me, noodles and shrimp, soup that smelled like feet, and greasy rolls filled with wormy-looking salads. I loved her so much I used to sneak peeks at her sleeping in the little bedroom off the kitchen, which we later turned into a walk-in pantry. Teresa used bleach straight from the bottle when she washed down the counters; the house smelled hospital-clean and unfamiliar. She never ran out of things to dust, or fix, or sew. Two nights a week she took English at the high school and spent Sundays at the Catholic church, volunteering to help other refugees arriving in the county.

Teresa kept a jar on the counter labeled “The Swears of Beth and Peachy.” She’d learned bad words to watch out for and any time we uttered “damn” or “goddammit” or “shit” or even “piss,” she’d scribble the word on a piece of paper and drop it into the
jar to tally later. She said God wouldn’t allow us to fill up more than one jar in a lifetime. In her bratty need to see it stuffed, Beth unleashed a barrage into the kitchen air and watched Teresa Tran frantically rip a sheet of paper to shreds, trying to keep up: poo, dummy, fucker, kaka, asshole, bumbum, fart, mixed in with God, Jesus Christ, and Holy Mary Mother of God, filled the jar, pressing up against the glass like the guts of a dirty religious novel.

She stayed for nine glorious months, and there were times I thought that even Beth might warm to her. Once, she even asked Teresa about her own mother back in Vietnam, while she was cleaning the cubby under the sink. Teresa told us that she didn’t get along well with her mother, but that she was fat and funny, and that people would bring her their wounded animals because she was the town’s amateur veterinarian.

“A Vietnam vet!” Beth squealed, a joke that flew over Teresa’s head.

“What about your mom? What do you remember about your mom?” she asked in her halting English.

After a long pause Beth said, “She always had gum.”

Teresa looked at Beth with such concern I thought I’d cry.

Not long after that, Lou made the mistake of introducing Teresa to Lorenzo Mann, the man who took the truck off his hands for a fair price.

“You should marry that guy, Teresa,” Beth said, after noticing the two of them hovering by the carport playing with one of the barn cats. At almost thirteen, Beth was easily a head taller than Teresa. And she must have felt filled with some kind of power when, a few weeks later, Teresa did just that, becoming Teresa Tran Mann before moving with Lorenzo to the Yukon.

I was devastated; Beth, nonplussed.

“Their kids will be cute,” she said.

I wrote my first letter ever to Teresa Tran Mann. She soon replied that she was “bored in so many times up here,” writing
that it was “cold in the air, in the house, and in the heart of it too, though I press on as we all very must.”

We stayed in touch for two months, then lost track. Then she, like Nana Beecher, like Nell, like every other woman I knew, left the farm too.

A
FTER THE BARBECUE
, Beth helped Lucy and me clean up in order to bust me free from the group sooner. When she visited home, we always stopped into the tavern for a drink, or in her case several, plus shooters. And now we had the ridiculous need for privacy in order to discuss our prank on Marcus, not to mention how she planned further debasement in New York. It was twelve hours before we were meant to leave for the airport, six before I walked in on her having sex with my husband, and my hands still smelled like the bubble bath Beau and I had given the boys before we kissed their wet heads and put them to bed.

There had been nothing off about Beau’s demeanor during Beth’s arrival, Lou’s barbecue, the boys’ bath, nothing to suggest that in a few hours he’d bang my sister up against the pickled beets in the pantry off the kitchen. Watching him wrestle the boys dry, I had even made a mental note to seduce him later. I wanted him.
I did. I used to love Beau’s brilliantly simple method of seduction, which, judging from what I had remembered, and what Beth had told me, hadn’t changed all that much since high school. Once he had it in his mind, he was like a snowplow in his single-minded pursuit of sex. With stunning momentum, he would remove every excuse, shove aside any of my arguments, too tired, too late, too busy—too bad, he’d say. Then after a brisk chase, I’d find myself lying in a breathless pile at his feet, cupping a rug-burnt knee. I had wanted Beth to overhear a variation of this later that night. I’d been feeling guilty about my emails to Marcus and my subsequent filthy thoughts, so I wanted to assure Beth (and myself) that I was really in love with my husband. And I wanted her to know that, despite my complaints, I had made all the right decisions about my life, that I had not regretted staying on the farm and stumbling into marriage and motherhood at twenty.