The Good Sister (2 page)

Conversation in the gallery hushed as the jurors entered and took their seats. One, a college student, looked sideways at
Simone; but the others directed their gazes across the courtroom to the wall of rain-beaten windows. Among the twelve there
were two Hispanic women in their mid-twenties, one of them a college student; three men and a woman, all retired professionals;
a Vietnamese manicurist; and one middle-aged black woman, the co-owner of a copy shop. Roxanne tried to see intelligence and
tolerance and wisdom in their faces, but all she saw was an ordinary sampling of San Diego residents. For them to be a true
jury of Simone’s peers at least one should be a deep depressive, one extravagantly rich, and another pathologically helpless.

Just let them be good people, Roxanne prayed. Good and sensitive and clear-thinking. Let them be honest. Let them see into
my sister and know that she is not a monster.

August 1977

R
oxanne’s mommy said they were going for a long trip in the car, and that it would be an adventure; but she wouldn’t say where
they were going or how long they would be gone. When Roxanne asked questions she just walked away, sat at the table in the
kitchen, and smoked cigarettes.

In less than two weeks Roxanne would begin first grade in Mrs. Enos’s class at Logan Hills Elementary School in San Diego,
and she wanted to stay home and get ready. Mrs. Enos’s classroom was on the edge of the playground in a temporary building
that didn’t look like it had ever been painted. Mommy called the building a portable and said it had been around since Jesus
Christ wore diapers. Roxanne didn’t know who Jesus Christ was, but she liked the portable classroom because it seemed like
a clubhouse
and the door opened right onto the playground. She didn’t care that there were no trees on the playground and barely any equipment
to climb or swing on, and she didn’t care if Logan Hills Elementary had mice and roaches shiny as black olives because in
the first grade she was going to learn about numbers.

She was already a good reader. Her mother and Mrs. Edison said it was spooky the way she had taught herself. They asked her
how she did it, but she couldn’t tell them. She just paid attention to words like the ones in Mrs. Edison’s recipe book and
the sounds that went with them until the squiggles on the page started to make sense. Plus she watched
Sesame Street
at Mrs. Edison’s house. That was also how she had learned to count, but any dummy with fingers and toes could do that.

While Mommy went to work Roxanne stayed next door with Mrs. Edison, a soft, blond woman who had no children of her own and
appreciated the extra cash. It was she who had walked Roxanne to the elementary school, shown her the portable classroom,
and introduced her to Mrs. Enos. The teacher was tall and had brown skin and frizzy orange hair. She crouched down to say
hello, eye to eye. “You’re going to love this one,” Mrs. Edison said, wagging her eyebrows; and Roxanne’s face got hot because
she knew Mrs. Edison was talking about her.

When she said good-bye Mrs. Enos gave Roxanne a silver pinwheel that spun blurry-fast.

Mrs. Edison’s husband and Daddy were both in the Marines, but that didn’t mean they were best friends. On his own time, Daddy
played poker and pool across the street at the Royal Flush. Mr. Edison’s nose was always stuck in a copy of
Popular Mechanics.
Mommy said he was going places in the Marines, and Daddy said big effing deal.

Grown-ups spoke a peculiar language full of words and mystery phrases like
big effing deal
that Roxanne didn’t know. One day Mrs. Edison took her to the library, and she looked up
effing
in the big blue dictionary. It wasn’t there, and that got her started worrying how she would ever learn the meaning of all
the words people spoke. On television children talked to their parents and their parents talked back. Questions and answers
were called conversation; and while no one ever said it, not exactly, Roxanne knew Mommy and Daddy didn’t want to have conversation
with her.

If Mrs. Edison was in a good mood she answered Roxanne’s questions but she told her to watch out, curiosity killed the cat.
Mrs. Edison had a yellow cat named Tom but he’d be hard to kill because he had nine lives. Roxanne talked to other people
and knew the postman had been bitten by a dog and got ten stitches in his arm, and the woman at Von’s market was having a
baby and she hoped it was a girl so she could call her Rashida. Up and down the street she spoke to everyone, including the
woman on the corner who always wore a scarf. All this talking, the
words she didn’t know and the contradictory things that people said, confused her. She had decided there must be rules for
what was right to say and feel, rules for when to talk and when to listen, and sometimes she was afraid of what would happen
to her if she never learned these rules. She didn’t want to be like the homeless woman who wore a red wool cap even in the
summertime and talked gibberish to herself as she pushed her shopping cart along the sidewalk in front of Roxanne’s house.

Roxanne’s world was full of dos and don’ts—don’t cross the street on a red light or touch a hot stove, do lock the doors at
night, and don’t talk to strangers—so it made sense that there must be rules that applied to how people talked and what they
did. Maybe if she read enough books and learned all the words in the dictionary and if she never stopped watching and listening,
she would understand why mothers on television loved their daughters, but hers didn’t.

At dinner Mommy said, “You’re going to stay with your grandmother for a while.”

This was the first Roxanne had heard of a grandmother.

“We’ll leave tomorrow after breakfast. Put what you need in that pink backpack and don’t forget your toothbrush.” Mommy went
into the bathroom and closed the door.

The questions lined up like Marines in Roxanne’s
logical mind, a platoon of them beginning with
why
and
who
and
when
and what would happen if she missed the first day of school.

She heard the sound of water running into the tub. In a minute steam would seep out from under the door like smoke. Mommy
must be nervous. She always took a bath when she was nervous. The medicine cabinet opened and clicked shut; the lid of the
toilet seat hit the tank behind it. These were normal sounds and nothing to worry about. But if everything was normal, why
did Roxanne feel like something big and mean and cold as a polar bear had walked in the front door and was right now standing
in the middle of the room, staring at her?

“Are you mad at me, Mommy?” They sat at the card table eating spaghetti.

“Why? What have you done?”

This trip to her grandmother
felt
like trouble.

“Eat your dinner. Let me think.” Mommy twirled the spaghetti around the fork in her right hand; she held a cigarette in her
left.

Her mother’s name was Ellen and she was prettier than most of the moms on television. Mrs. Edison said she had hair to kill
for. At the roots it was dark brown like Roxanne’s but every few weeks Mommy washed it with something stinky that came in
a box and turned it a silvery-yellow color. She wore her hair in long loose curls and looked like one of Charlie’s Angels.
Her face
reminded Roxanne of the kittens in cages at the pet store when they pushed their noses against the wire and mewed at her.
Roxanne wanted to take them all home, but Mommy said over her dead body.

Roxanne hated when she said that.

“Are you?”

“Am I what?”

Mad at me.

“You know.”

“No, I don’t know.”

“How long are we going to be there?”

“You mean how long are
you
going to be there. I’m not staying one minute longer than I have to. I gotta work, you know.” Mommy worked at a Buick agency
on the National City Mile of Cars. The ads on television said it was the biggest dealership in San Diego County. “Mr. Brickman’s
letting me use a good car.”

“Am I going to sleep there?” The polar bear was ready to swallow her up now, and there was something heavy in her stomach
like a thousand ice cubes bunched together. “I don’t want to sleep there. I want to stay in this house.” One bedroom, a kitchen
with space for a table, a bathroom with a tiny window over the tub, and a screened porch at the back where Roxanne slept.
“I like our house.”

“You need your head examined.”

Mommy put her bare toe on the pedal of the garbage can, and the top sprang up and clanged into the side of
the stove. She dumped most of her dinner. Mrs. Edison said Mommy didn’t eat enough to keep a bird alive.

“What if she doesn’t like me?”

Roxanne’s mother sighed as if she had just that minute put down a bag of rocks and been told to pick up another. “Look, I
know you don’t want to go up there, but believe me, I’ve got my reasons and they’re plenty good. Someday you’ll thank me.
But we’re not going to talk about it and that’s final. And I don’t want you calling me up and whining on your grandmother’s
dime. She’d make me pay for those calls and like I’ve said to you about a thousand times only you don’t seem to get it, I
am not made of money.”

After dinner Roxanne pushed a stool up to the sink and filled a square plastic tub with hot water. She washed two plates and
two forks and the spaghetti pot. She rinsed her glass and sudsed away the milk scum, rinsed it again in the hottest water
she could bear and set it in the drainer. As she worked she thought about her mother’s words. Some of the things grown-ups
said were ridiculous. But not all. The trick was figuring out when Mommy meant what she said and when she didn’t.

Hair to kill for.

Made of money.

Roxanne wiped down the counter and the stove top. She emptied the brimming ashtray on the table and put the beer cans in the
garbage and swept the kitchen floor, careful to poke the broom into the space between the stove and the refrigerator where
the greasy dust bunnies
lived. She imagined people with dollar bills for arms and legs and eyes made out of coins. The children would have Indian
faces like the nickel she once found in the gutter.

Roxanne set the timer on the stove for one hour, the length of time she was permitted to watch television after dinner. Mommy
didn’t like Roxanne to sit close; but the yearning to lean against her shoulder, to press her body against her mother’s hip,
was so intense Roxanne’s skin tingled the way it did when she knew the oven was hot without touching it. On television she
had seen mothers and daughters with their arms around each other, kissing and hugging. Was she meant to believe this or was
television like a fairy tale, a made-up story no different from the fantasy about children with heads like Indian nickels?

There was so much Roxanne didn’t know.

Mrs. Edison baked pies and cakes to earn extra money, and she had taught Roxanne to read the recipes. Roxanne liked cooking
because when Mrs. Edison followed the directions Roxanne read to her, the desserts turned out perfectly. But life wasn’t like
cakes and pies. Even when she did exactly what she was supposed to do, Roxanne was still afraid when she heard Mommy and Daddy
talk and laugh and fight at night. Though their words went by too quickly to understand and she pulled the blankets over her
head, making a tent full of her own familiar breath, their mixed up angry-happy voices filled the darkness. She thought about
the homeless woman in the red wool hat and wondered if she had ever been in the first grade.

Roxanne and her mother lived on a street where the traffic was noisy until late at night. There were two bars on their block.
One had a name Roxanne could not read because it was in Spanish. Mommy often left her in bed at night and walked across the
street to the other one, the Royal Flush; and when he was home from the Marines, Daddy made money playing pool there.

Roxanne tried to remember when she had last seen her daddy. She remembered asking her mother where he was, but she had forgotten
the answer. She raked through her memory for something she had forgotten or done wrong that would explain why Daddy wasn’t
home, and Mommy was making her live with a grandmother she’d never met or even heard about until that day. At home she didn’t
talk too much or whine for candy in the supermarket or ask even half of all the questions in her mind. She hardly ever forgot
to do her chores. In fact, she enjoyed making the kitchen orderly after dinner; and in the morning she made her bed and swept
the porch before she went to Mrs. Edison’s. It gave her a safe feeling when all the chores were done.

In the car the next day she asked, “Are we almost there yet?”

“We’re not even to Bakersfield.”

Roxanne imagined a field full of Mrs. Edisons and all of them rolling out pie crust and making cakes.

“How long till we get to Bakersfield?”

“Stop with the questions, Roxanne. I’ll put you out at the side of the road, I swear I will.”

From the car window she saw a sad part of the world, run-down buildings and vacant lots, broken-down fences and hardly any
trees, just bushes that looked like dried-up spiders, and paper litter, fast-food wrappers and coffee cups blowing up from
the dirt at the side of the road as cars and trucks rushed by. How would she live out there?

A dry wind blew grit into the car, and Roxanne’s hair flew up and around her face in tangles that made her skull hurt. She
held up her silver pinwheel and watched it whirl into a blur. She thought about nice Mrs. Enos, and wondered if she would
look around her first grade class and worry because there was no Roxanne.

The Buick loaned to Mommy by the dealership was shiny and almost new-looking, but the air-conditioning didn’t work. When Mommy
realized that, she said a lot of the bad words forbidden to Roxanne, who had no idea what they meant anyway. In the heat Roxanne’s
bare legs stuck to the car seat. Already she knew she would be unhappy in Daneville. She imagined her grandmother had a nose
that curved down and almost touched her chin.