The Almost Archer Sisters (25 page)
Read The Almost Archer Sisters Online
Authors: Lisa Gabriele
Nadia nodded and repeated the name. They both regarded me with pride, as though they had carved the silk itself.
“The woman’s a genius.”
“She is,” said Nadia.
I had no idea who they were talking about, and I didn’t care. Because I had found the woman I was looking for, and her name wasn’t Diane, it was Georgia. All I had needed was this dress to point me to her.
So this is what it’s like to be a girl, I thought, while taking out my charge card at the cashier’s. A dueling plastic smackfest ensued and Nadia eventually won. In the end, I let her buy me the dress because, as she said, it was her idea and she wanted to take all the credit. She promised to let me pay for the shoes but only if she could pick them out. How could I argue? What did I know, after all, about being a girl, shopping with a girl, and letting her mother the hell out of me? My mother died when I was five. Beth left when I was on the cusp of needing all of this so badly I didn’t even know it until Nadia wrapped a perfect dress around my body and found a pair of sling-back sandals I swore I’d never take off. As we sampled perfume in Bloomingdale’s, poked through the stacks of a bookstore bigger than our downtown library, and hit a bustling deli for turkey sandwiches and Diet Cokes, I was infused with a kind of ghostly nostalgia for days I had never experienced. Soon after Beth left, my life had become all male so fast that anything feminine about me seemed to have been washed away in the constant laundry of my life, the sweat socks and skid marks and pee of my boys and men. My natural scent had become the lemons of dish soap with a dash of wet dog thrown in. While wandering in the temple of women, among other women, I felt like Cinderella’s secret sister, the one who wasn’t even informed that there were Polish godmothers to be had or city princes to meet or sling-back shoes to try on and buy or dinner reservations
to get to on time, let alone depart from before your ride home turned into a monstrous gourd.
I turned to Nadia in Saks and said, “I believe I am having what is known as a great day.”
“I’m glad, Peachy. Let’s hope you have a great night,” she said, placing a wide-brimmed hat on top of my head and adjusting it.
T
HE LAST PERSON
I expected an email from, the person I had the most difficulty imagining sitting in front of a computer, composing and sending one, was Lou. But there it was, waiting for me at Beth’s after I’d kissed Nadia goodbye (both cheeks) and jostled past Jonathan with my oversized bags. I looked like a cartoon girl on the cover of those novels I’d never read because the shopping they celebrated seemed altogether malevolent. Lou’s email, which had come from our family account, was titled “While You Were Gone.”
Dear Peachy
,
Just writing that now, and it’s been so long since I wrote your name, I’m thinking maybe we should have just stayed calling you Georgia. I always thought it was a kind of regal name but too big for such a little girl. I am
trying hard not to interfere, trying to leave all this in God’s hands. You know my take on pain, that we are nothing without it. I believe that’s why God made the family to begin with. Training wheels for real life. But it is awful when family’s where the biggest pain comes from
.
Since you drowned the laptop, I write this from the copy shop in town. Beth wrote your email address, and this young woman here showed me how to work this thing. You should know last night I made my home on the couch to clear space for Beau to ruminate and sulk in the trailer
.
I am no arbiter of marital accord, or how to achieve it. Your mother and I had a difficult go of things. Not just because her depression was so deep, but the fact is I was a lousy farmer and I had a lot of guilt over skipping out on a country at war, and from marrying a woman who never loved me. She sure tried. She was just never mine for the having. Tooey was her love long before I was graced by her ride. But I am daily grateful for her generosity in marrying this almost soldier, who would have died from cowardice over there before a bullet could have grazed me. She gave me two girls I can’t love any more than I do, who’ve blessed me with more than I know I deserve. Fact is, she never wanted to come back to the farm, let alone stay. But because of my predicament, and the fact that I saddled her with a new baby right off, she felt forced to. I long have urged both of you to let go of any responsibility you two may have felt toward your mother’s death. But a part of me lives that believes she left like she did because of me. It’s the part I try to whittle down daily, but it pops up in times like this. I suspect it grows in Beth too. We forget, she may have been only eight then, but she was no dupe. When I look at how aware Sam is of any kind of discord, compared to the way Jake just kinda rolls with things, I can’t help
but remind myself you two were roughly the same age as the boys during those treacherous days
.
I know you want an update on how Beth’s faring in the role of temporary caregiver. She’s no you, Peachy, but she has an endearing knack for the boys, probably, as she jokes, because she’s about their mental age. Somewhere in the middle. She puts it at seven and I don’t argue
.
Yesterday was busy for Beth, and a little confusing for the boys. They asked why she was here still and not with you in New York, and she said, “Because I love your mother and I want you guys to still be my friends.” Sam asked her why you were mad at Beth, and she said, “Because I did something very wrong and your mother is very right to be mad at me.” And when he asked her what she did, she said, “The worst possible thing to the people I love the very most.” Then Jake asked if she felt sorry, and Beth said she did and would for the rest of her life
.
That seemed satisfactory to them. The boys seemed to regard Beth with a kind of wary affection because they know you left in anger and that Beth had something to do with it. Sam had a small and uneventful episode; it came and went in under seventeen minutes. I was here, so there was nothing to worry about. Beth was out with Jake and Scoots at the pond. Beau’s been doing a lot of weekend work at the shop. He doesn’t want to be around, and that’s understandable. But he was home to tuck them in. Will be tonight too
.
I know you don’t want to hear this, but as a man who’s done some awful things too, I worry for Beau. He’s done big damage, but mostly what he’s guilty of is seeking selfish comfort in a place that had no business giving it to him, not the least reason being there was none to give. People like Beth can be powerful vortexes when they’re holding
on to the bottom rung, as I believe Beth’s been doing for some time. I’ve often trotted out that old hippy saying of “living in the moment.” Smarter people than me say it’s the definition of happiness. But sometimes I think Beth lives too much in the moment, especially when she drinks. She’s become completely unaware of the consequences. I also believe that she’s letting go of that ladder
.
You know she drinks. You know my policy on preaching. What I’m saying is that if this be her bottom, we have to ensure a hard landing pad. This time I can’t catch her. I told her that and she cried like a child. I cried too. Later, in private. These have been hard days for me, because to know there is hatred and betrayal between your children is an awful kind of parental cancer
.
Peachy, you once wanted to be a social worker. You wanted to help sick and damaged people. And because you are a natural saint I know you will proceed with your graces intact, which you probably feel have abandoned you. They haven’t. They’re just dormant
.
From your loving father …
No doubt Lou hoped to have a palliative effect on me. He wanted to use his words to build a buffer between me and Beth, between me and any actions I had planned on taking against her. But instead of a pause, instead of a reconsideration, his note left me feeling inflamed and, frankly, bereft. I kept my reply brief, knowing Beau or Beth would probably read it before handing it off to Lou.
Thanks for your note. I hope when I screw up you’ll be equally eloquent in making my case to my loved ones. I will see you at the airport tomorrow. Kiss and hug the kids for me. Tell them I’ll be home after lunch. Tell them they only have to go to sleep and wake up one more time. I hope
Beau is comfortable down at the trailer. And I hope Beth kisses the farm goodbye. I’ll be taking my better graces out for dinner and drinks tonight. Perhaps that’ll revive them
.
A
S USUAL
, I got ready too early, but even with the air-conditioning, I felt too hot to pace the apartment. I was a hurry-up-and-wait-type person, for the boys at school, for Beth at the airport, for Beau after work. I was the really early bird who waited for the worm to surface. I heated up food I had cooked too soon. I drove around the block to avoid being the first to a party or a shower. I ordered another while I waited, and waited, the serial killer of time. But after catching a glimpse of my face in the mirror, I realized applying makeup passed time rather dangerously. A solid layer needed to be troweled off, which carved a necessary fifteen minutes from my potential “wandering the block” time.
I did look nice in that dress, the skirt cutting across the part of my legs that were thinnest, the firm fabric draping over my ass like a heavy flap. The slit provided the perfect amount of sexiness. I grabbed the folding map and checked my route to the restaurant. In these shoes anything was walking distance, I decided, and stepped out of the elevator into the lobby.
Jonathan looked up and then covered his eyes and then uncovered them.
“My, my, my,” he said. “You look wonderful.”
“Why, thank you,” I said, spinning around like a goof.
“And what occasion could warrant such a dress?”
An occasion informed by fraud and vengeance, I wanted to say. With a dollop of sexual danger thrown in.
“I’m meeting a friend for dinner. In Greenwich Village,” I said, feeling entitled to those words.
“Where are you meeting your lucky friend?”
I told him, and he gave me directions that matched the lines and arrows I had drawn on my own map. Despite the motives behind meeting my so-called “lucky” friend, I felt terribly proud of myself.
“Thank you,” I said, smiling, winking, flirting. I was flirting. I was good at it.
W
HEN SHE WAS
in love, I could see how this city could feel like Beth’s costar, her cohort, her coconspirator. I could see why flowers in buckets that she might normally pass with little appreciation could suddenly turn into tiny Ziegfeld girls in this city, marking a path with a theatrical tilt of their heavy heads. That’s the way I saw things walking to Greenwich Village in my dress. Even the garbage men seemed romantic here, hinging themselves out from the side of their churning white trucks, looking more like regal jousters than portable janitors. I was feeling floaty and foolish, remembering that Beth once told me that the best thing about New York is that the city itself cared about who you were and what you wore.
“And that’s a good thing?” I asked.
“No, Peach. That’s a great thing,” she said. “Why do you think talented Canadians leave Canada for New York?”
“For American money?”
“No,” she said. “It’s because talented people tend to be weird and weird people tend to be iconoclasts and Canada has no idea what to do with people like that.”
“But you’re not a weird iconoclast, Beth.”
“Not yet,” she said. “But I’m working on it.”
I passed an old cookbook shop, marveling that a shop specializing in old cookbooks could be a viable business anywhere. Who shopped there? Who urgently needed to buy a used cookbook?
I walked up Bleecker Street and past all the gay shops and people, trying not to gawk at flamboyance. I turned onto Hudson, nauseous with worry, even though Marcus was meeting Georgia, not married Peachy whose husband had recently been caught cheating. He was meeting a horse-riding, private-school-going girl named Georgia, not a university dropout and current housewife with a brain-stormy son who peed his bed and fainted in malls. He was meeting Italian-speaking Georgia, a chick with a bright future and a yellow racing bike, not Peachy, who still lives with her father in the same house and town in which she was born. Georgia was single, arty, and original, the type of woman who would never even give Beau Laliberté the time of day, let alone sleep with him, marry him, and give him a couple of sons.
My stomach was getting busier as I got closer to the restaurant. God, I thought, Beth put herself through these painful procedures all the time. All those first dates she’d told me about, the assessments, the acceptances, the dismissals. It couldn’t be good for the health or digestion, let alone the human spirit. The mere potential for mortification that evening felt so corrosive, I could only imagine that serial rejection could ruin a person forever.
Where Hudson met Eighth Avenue, I strolled to a stop at a small park and lit a cigarette. I watched women blow by me, leaving a lot of different sounds and smells in their wake. Some were yakking into the space in front of them, like zombie models, their phones hooked around their ears. Like Beth, they seemed to wear a wall of purposefulness around them, like an invisible, expensive force field. I watched a specter of a woman poke through the middle of a slow-moving crowd. She was a wisp really, clacking her staccato stilettos toward me, bouncy hair bracketing her shoulders, a mouth like a punch, eyes angry, breasts rising and falling a beat behind the rest of her body. Without breaking stride or looking at me, she careened around my body like she was an avatar from one of the boys’ computer games, controlled by a celestial joystick. I was
not this, I thought. I could never be this. I was too fleshy, too earthbound.
Just ahead I could see the restaurant’s sign dangling above the street. I threw my cigarette in the gutter and smelled my breath. I couldn’t remember if we had said that Georgia was a smoker. I looked at the time on the cell phone, feeling a little disappointed that I was still ten minutes early. Beth always said she arrived late for everything, so people had a chance to feel anxious to see her. “Huh,” I had said, my stock answer to all her odd rituals. I had noticed earlier that the cell’s battery was nearly depleted, so I shut it off for the day to save up enough juice to squeeze in one more call to the boys.