The Almost Archer Sisters (22 page)

I could see Sam sitting at the head of the table, poking at something unfamiliar that Beth likely made for supper. Despite my warnings that he wouldn’t eat anything weird, Beth probably whipped up something like risotto or sushi, something involving weird mushrooms, booze, and fire. Then she’d wonder why a shy kid with a bad brain would balk at eating it.

“Don’t want to try it, honey?” she’d ask, eyebrow arched, trying to hide her disappointment. This would be Lou’s cue to wordlessly slap together a cheese sandwich for Sam, after which he’d plop himself down in front of the TV with a bowl of green grapes and the remote. Sam would know, too, that something was wrong with the way the weekend unfolded. He had picked up more than enough information during my dramatic departure to be wary of Beth and any of her awkward affections. So if he rejected her meal it would have more to do with loyalty than loss of appetite—a thought that triggered both pride and shame in me.

Jake, however, would try anything. Last year, Beth made osso bucco on a visit home, and he sucked the bone like a Viking, refusing to toss it to Scoots. If he was thrilled by her attention, he was thoroughly delighted by his ability to please Beth. He was a boy whose love of girls and women had never been subtle, even as a toddler. So I had no trouble picturing Jake with his legs swinging off the cracked vinyl chairs, hands under his thighs, grinning mouth covered in the stained remains of something exotic: curried
goat, lamb stew, goddamn paella, Beth mussing his hair in deep appreciation.
Somebody loves me
, she’d be thinking.
Somebody from my sister’s home doesn’t want me gone for good
.

I paid my bill and left a too-large tip and headed to the small park across the street, still keeping the top of Beth’s building within my sights. It felt enlivening to be jostling with other people probably heading home from work. But I admit I was a little disappointed that there were no weirdos, no punks with high hair, no crazy-looking hookers, no gay men dressed as circus performers. The crowds looked mostly normal, like people strolling a mall, or exiting a church, just more of them. I watched a young couple clutching hands on a park bench, their hair still damp from showers or sex. The man said something. The woman whipped her head to look at him. He looked away smirking as she stared moonfully into the side of his head, then down at his shoes as though contemplating her good fortune, or his good taste.

Even though it was just down the street from her apartment, Beth had probably never been in this park, let alone noticed it. I couldn’t imagine her purposelessly sitting anywhere, for that matter. Or if she was, she’d be nose-deep in a newspaper, carefully avoiding wrinkles, a woman you’d never see sporting tennis shoes, then changing into heels at work. No, Beth always said if you can’t afford the kind of heels that can survive the city sidewalks, stick to bloody Birkenstocks.

Still it was romantic (if not a little creepy) watching this couple squeeze in a few intimate minutes in public, neither one of them distracted by the traffic or the children buzzing around them. I watched great gulps of people coming in and out of the subway entrance, up and down a staircase in the ground. If I lived here, I would love having a subway, I thought. I would never drive. I would always take the subway to work. I would carry a Metrocard and I would memorize the routes like a pro. I hoped to muster the courage to ride it at least once while I was here, despite the
way the map made me gasp. How do the cars not crash into each other? How does someone descend down into that underground labyrinth and not get lost? And though I didn’t miss my imaginary career, I would have loved the idea of going to work, of moving along with other commuters in the morning, of having some place to be. Even the drive to the city for an appointment with Sam’s doctors was a welcome meditation. As I left the farm, I used to feel as though I was unraveling a spool of thin worry that would run out halfway to the hospital. At which point I would take up the strings of the efficient medical system, severing one set of concerns, then clutching another.

The cell-phone ring jangled me out of my trance, flashing a number I didn’t recognize. It was Kate. She was in the lobby of Beth’s apartment.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“I’m just across the street. Not far.”

“We’re going to Jeb and Nadia’s for dinner, remember? It’s in your honor. Come, come, come, come, come. Please?”

“But I ate.”

In my honor. I pictured myself on a throne, wearing a funny hat at the foot of a long table, fielding questions about Beth’s absence, knowing they all knew by now.

“You ate already? It’s only seven-thirty. Anyway, you can eat again. Wait. That didn’t come out right.”

I was too exhausted to fight her, plus too curious about Jeb and Nadia’s place (and marriage) to say no. I wanted inside some of these buildings, to see how people here lived, where they stored their tampons and toilet paper and what kinds of pets they kept. I told her to give me a minute and I ambled across the street. Then I skipped toward the silhouette of Beth’s building like an anxious kid who’d strayed too far from her minder’s sight.

* * *

J
EB AND
N
ADIA
lived near a bridge in Brooklyn, in an old building that, from the dark street, looked terribly menacing. It was plain, square, and flat, with mismatched brick around the lower, newer, windows. I felt nervous to go in, not just because it was my first dinner party, in my honor no less, but the area looked poor and dangerous.

“Does everyone know why Beth’s not with me?” I asked Kate, suddenly feeling ashamed. But what had I done wrong?

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “You’re just here on a little break and Beth got delayed. That’s all.”

When the freight elevator deposited us onto their floor, things didn’t improve. The hallway was dim and cavernous. I had driven by projects in Detroit that had more charm. And good parking. Surely they both made money, I thought, feeling grateful that Beth lived in a place that was recognizable from magazines or TV shows. So when Kate said, “You’re going to die when you see this place,” I began to wonder if she was being serious.

Nadia hauled open the creaky barn door using what looked like her full weight and welcomed me with drama.

“PEE-chee! Everybody, Peachy’s here!”

A mild “yay” emanated from behind her. Some weak clapping. I felt thoroughly sick. But the place was enormous and more beautiful than anything I could have expected from the street. In fact, it was the opposite of the street, despite its alley-type features; brick walls and the ceiling exposed to all the inner workings of the apartment’s heat and hydro. It was rich-looking in the strangest kind of way, like Jeb and Nadia lived in a tastefully furnished factory, lit by fat candles and warm lamps.

“Wow,” I said. “It’s so beautiful.”

Nadia clutched me to her bosom like Nana Beecher might have, had she had a bosom.

“You are much prettier dan your sister,” she said. “Much.”

Nadia was a big blond Polish
woman
. Not fat, not at all. Large,
wide-shouldered, a woman who possessed the presence of an entire room of people. I followed her into the kitchen, where Jeb stood wearing an apron that said
KISS THE COCK
.

“Peachy. So good to meet you finally,” he said, holding my face firmly and planting two kisses, one on each side. He whispered, “Sorry Beth couldn’t make it.”

A thin man with strange glasses sitting at the island coughed “whore” into his fist. The room exploded with laughter. Not uncomfortable laughter, the real kind born of a real joke.

Nadia shot him a dirty look. Kate told him to “fuck off” in a singsongy warning kind of way.

“Kidding! Kidding! Sorry,” the thin man said, smiling, holding up his hands in surrender and offering me one. “I’m Anthony and I’m
kidding
. I love Beth. So nice to meet you.”

I shook his hand, and Nadia guided me over to a group of people in the living room area who seemed to be in the middle of a conversation about Cuba.

“We should be there. We should be investing. We should be putting up infrastructure. We should be developing hotels. We should be passing out free Coke.”

“Cocaine coke? Or Coca-Cola coke?”

“Both, fuck.”

“Dis is Peachy. Beth’s sister. On a little visit from Canada,” Nadia said, her hands framing my shoulders. It was hard to take all of their faces in at once.

“Hi, Beth’s sister,” a couple of them intoned in my general direction. I flipped up a hand and slapped it back against my thigh.

“Anthony you met. You know Kate and Jeb. Me, of course,” she continued. “And dis is Louis, Frieda, and Stacey.”

The names were familiar from Beth’s stories, but the only things that stood out were the seedy bits, the stories I’d laughed at, and lived off, frankly. For instance, Louis and Anthony used to date
until Louis insisted on being bisexual in case he met a rich woman and could retire. In fact, he had recently found out that he had a kid with a woman from college, a one-night stand, and that he resented paying child support, not because he didn’t make enough money on Wall Street, but because the kid was unattractive. Years earlier, I remembered that Frieda had flashed a bouncer to get the lot of them into a club. And that she shaved five years off her online dating profile. Stacey once sued a Ukrainian woman who burnt her vagina during a Brazilian wax job. She got $265,000, which she now considered her “entrance” fee, in that any man who made less than that had no chance of getting in. There were so many other places I wanted to be just then: a darkened bathroom suffocating under a horse blanket in the tub, lying down in the back of a pickup truck that was careening over a cliff, stuffed in a cannon about to be shot into a boiling lake. I almost prayed for Beth to pop in, to shelter me from having to make conversation with people to whom I had nothing to say. This was Beth’s kind of room, these were her people, arch and fierce, funny at the expense of others. I stood there hands clasped in front of me looking like a kid about to give a boring speech about Ancient Egypt or the awful business of wearing braces.
Ladies, gentlemen, esteemed judges
… Beth would have swanned in, wiggled herself down between two of the meanest ones here, interrupted their conversation and demanded a cigarette. Even better, they would have loved her for it. After which, she would have joined their conversation about Cuba like a fast car merging into loose traffic.
Blah blah blah embargo, blah blah blah black market
, all just run-on sentences until Beth would provide the punctuation, the joke, the final word, and when the subject was exhausted, she’d change it into something better. These thoughts didn’t make me jealous. They made me miss her. I realized why it had always been so wonderfully easy to go places with Beth. She cleared the path, made the entrance, laid the groundwork, did all the hard work of elevating the evening. I just carried the train.

“I must go cook,” Nadia said, turning and leaving me with these people.
Noooo. Don’t leave me
, I yelled in my head.

“That’s my broad,” said Jeb. “Broad” seemed silly but very apt. Not just because Nadia looked to be older than Jeb by a few years, but, like Beth, she carried herself differently than everyone else. But where Beth’s rails ran low to the ground, Nadia’s were higher than all of ours. I could see why Nadia rankled Beth. “She thinks she is sooo great,” Beth would say. But it was precisely that aspect, that pride of place, that made her seem great.

The group in the living room resumed their conversation under a dusting of cigarette smoke. I looked past them at what I thought, for a split second, was a poster of the Manhattan skyline. But it wasn’t a poster. It was the skyline in all its gaudy brilliance. It was dusk by then, and the buildings were washed in the kind of color you could never find in a can. As I moved closer to the window, the moon suddenly joined the buildings and I couldn’t help but laugh to myself. I couldn’t believe how beautiful it looked, hovering over the skyline. I felt choked up, like even the moon knew it looked better over here.

Jeb came up behind me, slapped a vodka and soda in my hands, and lit a cigarette.

“So. Tell me. What happened?”

“This is amazing. Look at that moon,” I said, smiling and sipping. I never thought the moon could put a person in a better mood, but it had. I pointed to his cigarette pack. He pumped one out for me and lit it. “What do you mean, ‘what happened’?” For a second I really had no honest idea what he was talking about.

“You
know
what I mean.
Beth
. Kate mentioned something about her and
Beau
. What the
fuck
?”

I tried not to look around the room at all the faces suddenly trying hard not to face me. Kate seemed to be eyeing the bottom of what must have been her second martini, pretending to pay attention to something Anthony wasn’t saying. Out of the corner
of my eye, Nadia was moving slowly in the kitchen area in case the pots and pans she was messing with drowned out what Jeb and I might say to each other. They reminded me of bored hyenas, dying to gnaw on the entrails of my wounded family. Beth would have launched a witty barb into the tense crowd, something sharp enough to counter their curiosity:
OK so yeah, my husband fucked my thinner sister and all I got was this lousy, extra-large T-shirt
, she would have said, to guffaws all around. The thought made me wish for my husband, a man whose job it had always been to shield me from this kind of menace. Whenever I’d been bored, out of my element, over my head or off my game, at the party, a barbecue, the tavern, or a banquet, I needed only glance sideways at Beau, and he’d appear by my side with my coat. If Beau were here, I thought, he’d have long since called us a cab. Before leaving he’d have smashed their faces together, Frieda and Stacey in particular, nose job to nose job—whack. Then he would have hoisted me into his arms like a rescuing prince, or an avenging angel (the kind who have sex with their wives’ sisters and then feel really bad about it), and carried me across the darkening room. But there was no one coming to get me, no one to save me from these people whose only real sin was to give me a supportive audience for my indignation, to allow me the necessary luxury of ripping into Beth. But I couldn’t do it. Even though I had never hated her more, I probably would have still thrown an arm across her chest if I slammed on the brakes at a stop sign.