The Almost Archer Sisters (2 page)

“Well, my love,” Lou said, his blue eyes watered down with genuine tears. “We will miss you oh so much, you know?”

“Aw,” she said, cocking her head as though Lou had merely been her kindly landlord for seventeen years and not the man whose last name she shared, who had sold most of his property to pay for her dreams.

“I’ll miss you too, Beth. A little,” I said, still bruised by her prank. I tried hard to catch up to Lou’s emotions, to muster up at least a hint of something sad around my eyes, but I couldn’t. It’s not that I wouldn’t miss her, but in the weeks and months before her departure I was becoming curious about what life would be like on a Beth-less farm and in what direction I might grow if I ever got out from under her dense shadow. I had plans. University, and then the purchase of a car perhaps. I wanted to grow out my bangs, read in peace without Beth snatching my books and lobbing them across the room if she wanted my attention. Perhaps I’d visit Nana Beecher in Florida. Nothing dramatic. But plans nonetheless.

“Oh, you will miss me. Believe me, Peach. You just don’t know it yet,” she said.

And that was it. She was gone. I did the walk and wave, following the heavy truck backing out of the driveway, later joining Lou on the porch, where we watched the sun come all the way out, the two of us sipping coffees on Nana Beecher’s wicker chairs. It was so quiet the air felt tinged with religion. Still, we wasted no time in reminiscing, both of us laughing loud and hard at Beth’s pot prank.

“Oh, man,” Lou said, exhaling with a whistle, “you can call Beth Ann Archer a lot of things, but you can’t say she isn’t funny. That’s
funny
, Peach.”

“I know. I walked right into it too,” I said, shaking my head.

“Always do.”

“I know it.”

We took in some more silence.

“You need to check that box though,” Lou said, taking a sip of coffee, “before we send it.”

“Already did,” I said, leaning back to click his cup with mine. I left out the part about cutting open the box and finding a sealed envelope resting on top of a pile of sweaters, my real name, “Georgia,” printed in Beth’s neat scroll. Inside was a note.

I placed the picture of Nell in the envelope and resealed the box. Later, Lou and I drove into town to ship them.

Over the next few years, while Beth pledged passionate allegiance to a flag he hated, Lou refurbished a silver Airstream trailer and turned it into a hair salon he parked out back near the river. While Beth made out with strapping models in crimson darkrooms, married instructors in dim hotel rooms, and one Korean lesbian on a dare, I lost my virginity to seedy Dougie Beauchamp after a high school rock concert and some beer in a parked car. While Beth financed her first trip to the couture shows in Milan by taking a summer job selling ecstasy for an overleveraged bond trader, I began studying for a glamorous career in social work, chosen because Beth always said I was a good listener, a great helper, her favorite sidekick, and, like her, I should try to make a living at whatever came naturally to me.

So I began the daily commute to the university to study the art and science of helping people help themselves. There I would learn how to negotiate the psychological landmines of longing and loathing, and to dissect how families can easily fall into the
throes of violence, poverty, and addiction. It was hard work, but I often felt like I’d be embarking upon something necessary, noble even, after graduation. So I acted smug rather than jealous when Beth called to say she had landed a high-paying job dressing vapid celebrities for national television. Sure, I would have liked to have gone to Rome or Paris on a press junket, and I wouldn’t have said no to meeting a movie star or eating a five-hundred-dollar meal. But I comforted myself with the knowledge that it was more important to help people be good than look good. Unlike several of my classmates, I actually read my expensive textbooks cover to cover, highlighting the parts I would later memorize, making it a priority to put a dent in the suggested readings list between the extra courses taken in an attempt to graduate a little earlier. Because Lou was right—managing the lives of the less fortunate felt like a thing I was born to do. I saw my name, Georgia Archer, before it was caboosed by Laliberté, with a B.S.W. on the end, followed perhaps by an M.S.W., and still later a Ph.D., because you never know. And I wanted it—really meant it—all the way up to the day I quit school, six credits shy of my degree, and a few months after the nicest guy in town knocked me up and married me at twenty.

I
ONCE READ THAT
prime hours for break-ins were between four and six in the morning, when occupants, if they were home, would be too deeply asleep to notice any commotion. But the boys were five and eight now, so it had been years since I’d been up before daybreak, years since I’d breast-fed my sons while watching the sun come up over the Rosarios’ farm across the way.

But now the morning sky was becoming so bright it hurt my eyes to look up, partly because I was slightly hungover for the first time in months, partly because tears were pooling in the corners of my eyes, which was partly due to the smoke from my first cigarette in eight years. But mostly it was due to the crying. Still, you could tell that it was going to be a beautiful day. Made me less afraid to leave.

We had arrived at the park a couple of hours earlier, I’d say about four-thirty in the morning. I had thrown the car blanket
over Jake, who fell easily back to sleep in the grass. Sam had stayed up with me for a while, slightly confused and beyond exhausted. Then he too dropped at my feet at the foot of the slide. I watched him get hit by his invisible lightning. You could tell the difference between sleep and a seizure by the way his feet would whip back and forth like tiny windshield wipers gone awry. I’d grown so blithe about his epilepsy by then, I actually petted his hair with my toes while he seized.

The dawn finally stirred Jake awake. He jumped up to tug on my pajamas like a teething lion cub.

“Mom, we have to go home now,” he said, knuckling the sleep from his eyes.

Why wouldn’t joggers stare? I’d gape too if I saw me sitting in the dark on the edge of the slide, looking as battered as a blow-up doll with a slow leak. I had a wad of balled-up Kleenex shoved in a nostril to stop the blood, and one hand down my eight-year-old’s pants patting around his little penis to see if he’d wet himself again. Jake began circling me in an orbital blur of impatience and confusion. It occurred to me that it was the first time he’d ever seen me smoke.

“Nasty sagrits!” he said, expelling big fake coughs.

“That’s right, baby, cigarettes are nasty,” I said, blowing the smoke skyward, watching Sam start to stir in the grass.

“I wanna go home!” Jake yelped. “Why do we gotta not go home.”

Watching his adorable anger, I suddenly wished I’d had a camera. If not for Beth, who flew in from New York six times a year to get her hair expertly touched up by Lou and to take me out on the town, I’d probably have no pictures of my boys. At the end of every visit, she’d pose us on the porch of the house in which she also grew up, sometimes on the wooden swing, sometimes on the paint-peeled stairs, sometimes by the mailbox,
BEECHER
scratched
out and replaced by
ARCHER
, which was scratched out and replaced by
CHEZ LOU
which had been professionally stenciled beneath
LALIBERTÉ FARMS
, the name I took when I married Beau.

Whenever the farmhouse felt like it would collapse under the weight of another new repair or addition, or another argument over how to pay for it, Beau would threaten to move us into town, into one of these bland model homes, on an even blander street. When he entertained these tangents, I’d feign deafness. Though nothing farmy remained about the farm, with 325 acres long sold to put Beth through college, another 80 leased to the bachelor brothers’ organic tomato concern, which now paid for Sam’s treatments in Detroit, I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. I never thought much about how a town becomes a city, but I suppose it had something to do with the evolution of our farm, how its outer acres were quickly sprouting subdivisions, its breeding inhabitants flourishing on the fringes of our remaining 20.

“For godsakes, smile, Peachy,” Beth would yell over the top of an impossibly small digital contraption, which no doubt cost more than Beau made as a mechanic in a week. “Be hap-hap-happy like me!”

But there’d be no commemorating this visit. Hours earlier, I had walked in on my husband Beau having sex with Beth from behind, the default position, I suppose, of people who can’t bear to look each other in the eye. Beth screamed, “Peachy!” And for the first time since our Roman Catholic wedding, my entrance inspired Beau and me to invoke the name of our Lord Jesus Christ in unison.

“Alrighty then,” I gently added, closing the door to the walk-in pantry. It killed me that even at the apex of my family’s apocalypse I was still polite. How I had willed my legs back upstairs to wake the boys in the middle of the night, I’ll never know. But I was grateful that I had Beth’s rented convertible as the draw.

“Sam, get up. We’re going for a drive in Auntie Beth’s fancy car. Get your brother.”

“What time is it?” he said, still surrounded by darkness.

“Time to go.”

Beth had promised them a ride that morning, not necessarily at four in the morning, but the hour didn’t dampen their enthusiasm. Sam ran downstairs bypassing the kitchen where his aunt and dad were now yelling at each other and furiously dressing. Jake trailed behind him. I grabbed my housecoat from the downstairs bathroom and calmly joined the boys in the carport where Sam was acting like a game-show model highlighting the convertible’s features.

“Is Dad coming?”

“Not anymore, Sam.”

I noticed the keys had been left in the ignition. Beth not only didn’t want children, I thought, she wanted mine dead. An exaggeration, sure, but when people asked her if she wanted kids, her standard reply was that she was too selfish to be a mother. She’d sometimes glance toward me for a contradiction I never offered. Instead, I’d nod away as she’d explain how much travel is involved with her work, how being the host of a popular style show meant being away from home at least a third of the year. She came up with the idea for
Clothing for Cavemen
while working as a stylist at MTV, a job that seemed to involve a lot of sex and shopping. But after she’d told a famous country singer that his hat made him look like an ass, an executive who fell in love with her frank manner put her on TV. Thus
Cavemen
was born, a show that involved bossy Beth telling hick boys and blue-collar men how to dress like rock stars, for success—or just plain sex—a skill she had honed as a teen in our small town.

“Sam, you buckle your brother in, okay?”

He yanked the strap across Jake’s hip bones.

“Mum. I have to pee bad,” Jake said.

“That’s okay, sweetheart,” I said, throwing Beth’s rental into hard reverse. The tires spit a very specific hailstorm of gravel at the back of Beau’s Jeep. “You can pee in the car.”

O
F ALL THE
idiot things to wake me. It wasn’t the sound of Beau and Beth wrestling in the pantry. It was forgotten meat. I had made a mental note to pick up steaks on our way back from the hospital. But my mental notes seemed to be written on blackboards left in the rain. I wasn’t new to the twin jobs of stay-at-home mom and full-time housewife, but I had always been lousy at them. I wasn’t a rememberer, a darner, a scrimper, a time saver, a coupon cutter (my sister-in-law, Lucy, kept a little file folio. She alphabetized the damn things!). I didn’t clean as I cooked. I watched too much TV, listened to the radio too heartily, pacing back and forth between the rooms in which they were left blaring: kitchen, living room, kitchen, living room, I paced, trying not to smoke, even though I had quit on our honeymoon eight years earlier, not for Beau, but for Sam who was five months old in my belly and already starting to swing from my bottom ribs. And even though I had the time, I didn’t volunteer to bring complicated platters to potlucks, smug upon my arrival. I was not the woman who said to the marvelers,
Oh, it was really nothing
, when, in fact, I had given it everything I had. Nothing I’d ever done turned out exactly the way it looked like in the picture. Not my dinners, not my house, not my marriage, not my education, not even the boys.

We had stopped at the Starlite Variety, now open twenty-four hours to compete with the 7-Eleven and the all-night grocery. I poured myself some stale coffee, bought licorice for the boys and an extra box of Kleenex for me. Sam was still out cold under the decrepit slide, the same one Beth and I played on as children. A lurid smear of my blood started at his wrists and petered out
at the tip of his thumb. I felt inside his pants again. Still dry, thank God. I’d grown immune to the mute stares a person would naturally attract when openly molesting a passed-out eight-year-old in a public park. I continued to ignore the morning joggers and dog walkers while I lit another cigarette. This used to be a small town. We used to know everyone. Then came the subdivisions and the monster homes and all these well-dressed strangers with their silver minivans and their skateboarding kids who never played in rivers or built forts like we did when we were kids. Instead, they hung out in menacing clusters in town, outside the doughnut shop or the diner, wherever they sold things kids could afford to buy.

Usually, I’d usher Sam home so he could seize in familiar surroundings. Peeing his pants was a constant concern with his condition, and now that he was noticing girls, the potential for permanent mortification was becoming difficult to stave off. After his diagnosis, we were given pamphlets on antiseizure medications and an awful helmet, a horrible boxer-looking contraption that made our already odd boy look like an insulated freak. Since he rarely wore the helmet, I added full-time head catcher to my résumé. We were also given pep talks by teachers and neighbors about what an “old soul” Sam was and how his so-called wisdom, his seeming maturity, would pull him through. But I knew Sam’s soul was the same age as his body; that he still believed his parents were omnipotent and that bogeymen lived under the bed. He could occupy himself with a stick and some dirt for longer than it takes me to finish with the soaps. He was so supportive of Jake’s imaginary friends you’d think he saw them himself. He was no more an old soul than I was. Yes, he was the quieter of our two boys, but if told a time bomb was embedded in your brain, you’d keep activity to a minimum too. It didn’t mean he was thinking deeper thoughts than the other kids. In fact, quite the opposite. When asked, “What are you thinking, buddy?” during one of those
faraway looks, he’d more likely have said chocolate cake or kittens than anything rueful, shocking, or sad.