The Orphan Sister (12 page)

We slept together twice, and I decided I loved sex, that I always wanted to have sex, that sex was all it was cracked up to be. Drew smelled like sweet timothy—a green, good scent. He seemed sweet and pale at the core—innocent, his heart radiant with the light sap of summer-starved fields.

My sisters were horrified when I told about the sex, even though we’d used condoms, even though he spent at least an hour on my relatively undefined needs before and after his were satisfied. Then he applied to West Point—and got in. And my longing for sex was still there, but I hoped for love now, too. Drew wrote long letters, with poems in them, for a few months at West Point, before he disappeared into the maw of the military and we broke up—I always felt as though we were mutual sounding boards, warm bodies, just friends.

Juliet had several bibles of college information. The best one was a comprehensive listing, the one book I was willing to study that summer. I had narrowed down my preferences to Oberlin, Brown
(though I didn’t really want to go Ivy, and I didn’t think I could get in, either), Hamilton College, Rutgers (which would mortify my father), Ramapo College, Swarthmore, Wesleyan, and UC Berkeley. Juliet didn’t approve of my list, but she did agree that I shouldn’t try for Harvard, Yale, MIT, or Haverford, which was just fine with me. I took picnic lunches of Cabot sharp cheddar and Granny Smith apples out to the raft via canoe. I lay out on the smooth, wet wood watching the sky change, thinking of the smell of the lake, overripe and ancient, and wondering whether there could be a beast at the bottom, a Loch Caspian Monster, as we’d half-joked, half-believed when we were little. My sisters, however obnoxious they were when Juliet asked them to define
voracious
or
vainglorious
, took the bible work in earnest. They were both applying early decision to Harvard. I dreaded their collective departure; I looked forward to being apart.

Our third week in Vermont, that last summer before we knew where we were going, the August heat came hard and heavy, unusual for Vermont. The window tapped with the sounds of flies hatching and battering themselves in an effort to enter the world. The lake was still, and Juliet had finished her work; one Friday Mom drove her to Burlington to the airport, where she exchanged our tutor for a new arrival: Dad. It felt as if he were a visitor, as if he didn’t belong in the realm of women that was our house. My sisters had grown apart from me somehow—clearly closed with their common goals. I didn’t want the same things they did, Harvard, excellence, but I wanted to be part of them, I was part of them, and I hated how they were hoarding their conversations
and competitions, working in tandem on their applications, swimming together and taking a Sunfish without at least asking if I wanted to come along. It seemed that way to me—as though only separating from my sisters could provide the true rebellion I desired. My mother, I feared, would remain placid whatever I did, silently hurt; my father wouldn’t notice. I consoled myself that three was too many for one little boat, anyway.

I wrote a bored letter to my friend Sophie. I listened to the cracking of the maples and white pines in the heat. There was no air-conditioning, so I descended to the dock, lowered myself into the water, floating on my back with my legs dangling down, sipping air like a sweet libation.

I heard the car rumble up the gravel drive. I didn’t move; if they didn’t see me, I might not have to talk to my father for another hour or two. Staying still, I was almost cold in the water, feeling the striations of chill from the deep lake to the shallow bathing water where my face lay. I moved my arms just barely, pretending I was a mermaid, a jellyfish. Even with my ears mostly under, I heard my mother—she was wailing as she slammed the car door behind her.

This is it
, I thought.
He’s leaving. Or she’s leaving, or something else—some crack in the still mirror of their limited relationship.
I hated him for abandoning her so often, hated him for making her who she was, not letting her be who she was in the pictures on the mantelpiece: valedictorian at Bard, scholar in white pants and a burgundy silk blouse, holding her happy black mortarboard hat as if it might float off her head, lift off into the sky.

I had heard my parents having sex, in the acoustically exposed Vermont house. I had heard my mother gasping and moaning, my
father grunting as if he were swinging an ax into wood, which the men from the farm did sometimes, the handymen, the men whose skin was prematurely aged around the eyes from squinting into the thin lemon of Vermont sun. Now that I’d had sex myself, I understood something: it wasn’t just the bodies, longing for each other, it wasn’t just a sort of cupcake consumption, half-visual, half oral; sex was a form of correspondence, and a form of currency, like electricity. I felt as though it would keep them alive, keep me alive, keep the world animated. I also knew I was waiting to be part of a pair, that I would surpass my parents when I was: the man I chose wouldn’t ever want to leave me for the rest of the world.

I lifted my head slightly, enough to hear more, but not enough to be witnessed, hovering like a weed by the dock.

“You have no idea what it takes!” she was crying, her voice embarrassingly shrill. “You are always gone—going, going, gone. Is it someone else? I swear, I’ve trusted you so long I’m afraid not to—”

“Don’t be hysterical, Octavia,” said my father, his voice low, which made her seem even more pathetic. He heaved his unzipped garment bag out of the back of the car, leaning heavily on one side. I willed him to fall over, to stumble, to grind dust and Vermont gravel into his Armani. I hated his suits. Scrubs were one thing, the beeper, the uniform of a surgeon, the hat, the mask—I’d observed my dad in surgery once, sitting between my sisters, feeling like a witness to a crime. They leaned against the glass of the theater observation room, ogling the blood, the innovative laser work he did, the fineness of everything, the finesse, as he manipulated someone’s brain, her core, the what made her herself. He was
removing a tumor, burning away bad cells with a tiny wand. Our father, magician.

“I’m not hysterical!” my mother screamed. “You promised a week!”

So it wasn’t anything new. He was just departing sooner than he said, as usual. He was just leaving and leaving and leaving, but he was never gone. He was in our planning for college, he was in our mother’s purse on her trips to the store; his name was on her credit card: Mrs. Lord.

My sisters sailed up to the dock just as my mother stamped inside. Our father posed as if he hadn’t just scolded our mother, as if there were nothing to fight about. He strode down to the dock and held out his arms for my sisters, possession. They jumped off the boat and into his arms, now just wearing a button-down, the suit jacket shed in the oak and flybound house.

“Girls!” he said. “I hear there’s great progress to report.” He kissed the tops of their heads. I watched, still floating, hoping no one would notice that I was being left out, hoping someone would.

I was almost hatched from high school—I felt independent and contemptuous in my separations, all of them: division from my mother, who seemed to fade as we set about cleaving from her (I scrutinized the dull gray roots of her hair; they grew out more in summer in Vermont and accused me of letting her get old, letting her fade as we acquired the shine of young adulthood). We were dividing, too, my sisters from myself, a pair in harmony and me, an entirely different melody. My father, most of all, began to irk me, began to appear didactic when before his firmness had simply
been a fact, an order that kept the world moving forward. I hated the way my sisters basked in his approval.

“I wonder whether you’ll get your letters the same day,” he said, glowing at them over black raspberry pie my mother had made with berries we’d picked—Juliet performed the lion’s share of the work without sampling a single berry.

“I wonder whether you’ll both get in,” I’d sneered because I wanted to change the subject.

“Clementine,” scolded my mother. “Jealousy is not becoming.”

“And subservience is?” I challenged her.

“Enough,” said my father.

“Yes,” I said. “Enough. She does more than enough for you, and you reward her by spending most of your time and energy elsewhere. What’s with the allowance, anyway, Dad? Is this 1952? You think your little Ph.D. lady can’t be responsible for money all on her own? Your little wifey?” It felt scandalous to say these things, but awful and true. He’d hurt her even as he arrived; I hated the way he drained her of power and joy.

“Enough!” yelled my father.

“Clem,” said my mother, appeasing.

“She’s just a child,” she said to my father, looking almost fearful.

“And that’s how he treats you,” I said. “I’m seventeen years old. I’m as much a child as my sisters, only the difference is they’ll be virgins until they marry—”

You suck
, Olivia said silently.
I’m sorry
, I replied.
I know
—this was Odette.
And we might.
They were talking in my head and I wanted to be angry alone.

My father stood up, thin-lipped. “I won’t tolerate this kind of behavior. You need to treat your mother with respect.”

“The way you do?” I said, but I was already running out of steam. It was my age, I told myself, I wasn’t a hateful person. What came out of my mouth was bitter.

On the other hand, the pie was delicious, buttery crust, a lattice cut with a fancy crust-crimper. My mother made things beautiful. I was just pretty sure she wasn’t happy, and it didn’t seem fair. He was.

“Enough,” my parents said in unison. Mom looked at Dad, her lips in the tilted bow of her adoration. I wanted to wipe off the expression. I wanted her to stop loving him that way until he earned it.

My sisters were holding hands under the table. I hated the way they clung to each other, an English fence, impenetrable, grafted together. Sometimes, I was surprised they hadn’t been born attached. I could easily join hands; they were there for mine, but I didn’t. Even if I was the one who made it so, I was deeply, deeply jealous that there were two pairs: Mom and Dad, O&O. I was always the odd one out.

That night, we heard our parents making love, once again, only this time my sisters and I looked at each other, horrified by the brazenness of their shouts. My mother was yelling, “Like that! Like that!” as we sat at the table drinking tea we’d made ourselves from pineapple weed and chamomile.

“Ugh,” said Odette, wrinkling her face.

“I do believe we need to go swimming,” said Olivia, out loud
for my benefit, as Odette had already taken in this information by merely looking at her twin.

We shed our clothes on the dock; the night was still hot, the sun finished, the lake glinting with the eye of the moon.

My sisters dived off the dock and wrestled, giggling in the water. Neither of them had had sex. It seemed odd, the two of them naked together, but then, we’d been a trio of naked babies in the womb. Our father had told us all he was proud of our plans, though he nodded at me, showing mild disapproval. Just wait, I thought. I’d decided to apply early decision to Oberlin. Even without visiting, I knew I’d love it there. I’d talked with alums on the phone, not formal interviews, but a chance to ask the kinds of questions I really had, such as what do people do at night? And what if you decide to change your major? Of course I’d enter premed. Otherwise my father might not allow the tuition. But Oberlin itself would bother him, would itch at him like contact dermatitis. And I wanted to make him itch, make him squirm.

So while I thought I was rebelling, that I was finding my own way, in fact, when I went to Oberlin, I was in search of a mate, and while college was about other things, underneath it all I wanted to be paired, plain as the pathetic girls looking for an MRS at other schools (this would never do at Oberlin), only I didn’t know it then.

M
y first roommate at Oberlin, Lily, had a theory about college.

It was our first night, and we’d arranged our belongings—her guitar near the middle of the room, my books claiming more than half of the insufficient shelf—in a cautious sort of self-deprecating territory-taking. Lily grew up in Wisconsin, an only child, and she could juggle, write songs, and weave her own fabric—she was also pixie pretty and liked the room much colder than I did, so she left the windows open in winter. I closed them. She opened them. After having my own room since we moved to Princeton, I’d been cautiously optimistic that I’d meet a best friend instantly, that we’d share clothing and enthusiasms and chemistry notes. We shared the middle of the three and were best of friends once we no longer had to divide about seventy-five square feet into two realms.

“I think first we’ll cast off old skins, you know, kiss random boys and take that experimental college class where you examine your own cervix.” She giggled.

“Really?” I asked, but I didn’t find it shocking, only a little odd as a collective activity.

“I might, but probably not; I’m a prude, deep down, are you?”

“I guess not.” I was experimenting with identity—I’d told Lily
I had two sisters; I hadn’t yet told anyone I had twins with whom I was tripletted. I was going incognito. It felt quiet and noble.

“Anyway, we’ll shed that first skin and then we’ll get weird calluses on the new skin, you know, from sleeping with the wrong random boys or learning we didn’t really want to see our own cervixes—”

“I wouldn’t mind.” A stain was on the ceiling above my long, narrow bed, a stain shaped like a comma, or an apostrophe, depending on which way you laid your head.

“Really? I’d be way too nervous to look with other people there.”

“I suppose I wouldn’t—if everyone was doing it,” I said, thinking the stain on the ceiling shouldn’t be there already; the room was freshly painted.

“And then we’ll actually start to learn how to live in the world.”

“Isn’t that a poem? ‘Learning to Live in the World’?”

“William Stafford,” she said. We belonged here. We belonged with each other as freshperson roommates, even if we’d bicker over who left a banana peel in the trash can and attracted clouds of fruit flies. But I wasn’t sure about her theory; I thought I already knew most of the things I needed to know. I thought I already had my final skin.