Two Sisters: A Novel (15 page)

Is that her?
That’s her, isn’t it? Her dress was blue, wasn’t it?

Was she waiting for her at Applebee’s? Expecting her to go ahead and order her favorite triple chocolate meltdown?
It’s chocolate, Mama. The only thing better is mo
—

Suddenly, at the far end of the block, across the street, Muriel saw a shape that was as familiar to her as the back of her own hand. A blue silk dress moved like a deep ocean swell. Uncombed blond hair bobbed up and down with each quick step. The woman seemed distressed, her eyes darted left and right. She walked in a near run. Behind her was a man. Holding her elbow, he steered her through the growing dinner crowd on the sidewalk. He, too, looked around, even behind. At that moment, the man tightened his grip on her mother’s arm and pulled her into a doorway covered by a small green awning. She drew back, but he held firm. His free hand reached up and cupped the back of her neck, beneath her blond hair. He pressed his body against hers; she didn’t resist. It looked as though she
melted
into him. Right up close to her face he said something. She nodded, looked away, then sprang back to him. With breathless proximity—the way Muriel had seen it a million times onstage—Lidia surrendered to the man’s embrace with a Broadway kiss, her neck bent all the way back, the very artery of her life exposed.

Quickly, Muriel left the corner and ran back to the theater, her sandals slapping on the sidewalk, hoping her mother wouldn’t turn in her direction and see her. With her chest heaving, she stood beneath the brightly lit marquis and faced in the other direction. Away from the doorway where her mother was pressed against a man who wasn’t her dad. Hopefully she could make it true—bad things could disappear if you looked the other way.

“There you are!” Lidia said, running up behind her, winded. “I’ve been worried sick.”

“Hello, Mama!” Muriel said, too brightly, her chest on fire with the attempt to conceal her panting.

“Was it a short show? I mean, shorter than normal? It
must
have been shorter than normal. I know shows are never
this
long, but, see, I had a horrible bout of claustrophobia. You know what that is, right? The whole world feels like it’s closing in. Really, there’s no cure other than fresh air and space. So, what could I do? I had to get out of there. I walked around the block, then around again. I completely lost track of time. Then I came back to pick you up and I couldn’t see you anywhere. Were you in the restroom,
kochanie
? Maybe you went to Applebee’s for ice cream cake?”

Muriel stood blank faced. She’d never heard her mother so talkative, never seen her hands flapping so birdlike in front of her face. As she spoke, she was out of breath, as if she was still running from the doorway. When she said, “I’m so, so sorry,” she didn’t
look
sorry at all. Her eyebrows weren’t pressed together, her head wasn’t bowed. Instead, she had the same look a dog has when you flip on the kitchen light and catch him digging through the trash.

“I never get ice cream cake at Applebee’s,” Muriel said.

“No? Okay then. Pie, pudding. You can have whatever you want.”

Her heart slid downward in her chest. Tears rose in her eyes. In all the times they’d been together, had her mother never really seen her at all?

“I want to go home.” Muriel opened and closed the snap on her purse. Her toes felt cold. She wanted to get on the train, get off at Metropolitan Avenue, walk to her house, climb the stairs to her room, shut the door behind her, and slide her feet into fuzzy slippers.

“Probably for the best,” Lidia said, her voice up an octave. “Your father will be waiting.”

They walked up to Broadway in silence. Instead of their usual extended route through Times Square in the colorful glow of neon, Lidia led her daughter to the smaller subway station on Fiftieth. “We’ll transfer,” she said in a clipped kind of way. The metal turnstile revolved with a definitive
thwunk
. Underground, the air was muggy and the overflowing trash can smelled like rotting bananas. For once, though, the train came fast. The doors opened and the two Sullivants stepped into the air-conditioning, taking the first two seats near the door. Muriel tried to make herself small so her shoulder wouldn’t bump against her mother’s when the train took off.

Before the M train screeched against the rail on its way below the East River, Lidia encircled her daughter’s shoulder with her cool bare arm and pressed her lips to the top of her head. Muriel wished she could retract her neck like a turtle. Softly, into Muriel’s hair, Lidia said, “There are things you need to know, sweetie, and things you don’t.”

Sweetie?
She’d never called her “sweetie” before. Muriel stared at graffiti etched into the window on the other side of the subway car, imagining the boy who did that. In the middle of the night, with only his friends in the car to egg him on, he pulled a giant paper clip out of the small change pocket in his 501 jeans. Opening it like a penknife, he furiously scratched back and forth while his friends stood sentry at either end of the car. She could almost hear them laughing in that supercharged teen way.

The train tossed Muriel and her mother together like socks in a dryer. Lidia said, “Look at me,” but Muriel stared straight ahead. Gently pinching her daughter’s chin between her two fingers, Lidia tried to turn Muriel’s head. Her fingernails were filed in a perfect U shape; her polish was the exact color of her skin. Bloodless and white. Muriel resisted until she felt her mother’s nails dig into her flesh.

“You’re almost grown up now, aren’t you?” Lidia asked.

Muriel didn’t answer. Head up, facing her mother, she noticed her lipstick was smeared beyond the borders of her lips. She wanted to say, “You’d better fix that before Dad sees it.” But she didn’t. She said nothing, kept staring at Lidia’s lips, watching them move as she said, “Grown-ups can tell the truth without telling every detail of it.”

Being a grown-up wasn’t so hot, Muriel decided then and there. It meant absolute silence from curtain up to curtain down even when there was no one in the theater to talk to. Grown-ups smiled with their lips, not their eyes, pretending nothing was wrong when there absolutely was. Muriel wanted her mother to let go of her face. With her head tilted up like that, she couldn’t avoid seeing the lines around her tense, messy-lipsticked mouth.

“I need you to understand what I’m telling you, Muriel.”

Tugging her chin away, Muriel said, “I understand.” Then she flattened her back against the subway seat. Lidia leaned forward and bent over to make sure they were eye to eye. “I’d hate to end our special Saturdays because I lost track of time. That would be awful, wouldn’t it?”

Like a sudden stop on the M train, Muriel felt her world dislodge in one jerking motion. She struggled for composure, tried to halt the tremble in her lips.

“Sweetie?”

Silently, Muriel nodded.

“Okay then. Let’s make a deal right here and now. Whatever happens on our Saturdays is between
us
. You and me. Nobody else’s business. We can see any show we want, eat any dessert we want. Daddy doesn’t have to know a thing. No one does. I’ll be really careful never to lose track of time again. I promise. Okay? What do you say? Can I continue to have my special matinee days with my very special girl?”

Muriel lifted her head and stared her mother straight in the eyes to ask the one question that had been haunting her since she’d seen her in the fading daylight, standing beneath an awning across the street, her neck bent back, her hair tumbling past her shoulders, tucked into a doorway where she thought no one could see her, having a Broadway kiss.

“Wasn’t that Father Camilo?”

Chapter 16

T
HE ENTIRE LUNCH
was surreal, as if they’d descended on the brass-edged escalator of the Plaza Hotel and into a parallel universe. Muriel had never seen her sister act so strangely. She seemed intoxicated on two glasses of wine. And when Pia abruptly announced, “Time to go,” leaving Richard and Edward pouting like schoolboys, she left the waiter a hundred-dollar tip and hurried into the bathroom to throw up.

“What can I do?” Muriel asked, helpless, from the next stall.

Between heaves, Pia said, “I’ve always been a cheap drunk.”

Outside, in the horsey air of Central Park South, Muriel hailed a cab.

“Let’s walk,” Pia said.

“Walk? You just threw your guts up.”

“I’m fine now,” she said, as serenely as ever. “Walk with me.”

To be truthful, Muriel wanted to put her sister in a cab and send the driver straight to the train station. She’d eaten so petitely at lunch she was already feeling a rumble in her stomach. Across the street, she could catch the M5 and be home in twenty minutes. Her day could pick up where it left off, before she was so rudely interrupted. There was still time to put the old towel back on the bed, crawl under the comforter, and pop open the metal lid on the Garrett’s tin. She could still snuggle into her Sunday.

“Could we ask for a lovelier day?” Pia lifted her face to the sun.

Muriel stared, agog. “You just roarked at the Plaza!” Then she stopped on the sidewalk and waited for Pia to notice and stop, too. When Pia turned around, Muriel said, “You never did tell me why you’re here. Why, exactly, are you here?” She reached up to untie the scarf.

Pia being Pia didn’t respond. She simply gazed at the ridiculously expensive knickknacks in the store windows along Central Park South and said, “Isn’t that emerald turtle divine?” Like a teenager, Muriel theatrically rolled her eyes. In the hundreds of times she’d taken the bus past these very same stores, she’d never once seen a soul enter or exit. They appeared to be fronts of some sort, as if the real business was conducted behind a two-way mirror in the back-office door. Or worse, they were tourist traps for wealthy foreigners who didn’t want to stray too far from their luxury hotels to buy a memento of their trip to a New York City luxury hotel.

They walked. Muriel fumed. She yanked the scarf off her neck and made a one-act play out of dramatically jamming it in her purse. Pia was holding her hostage. It wasn’t fair. Enough was enough. And never would she call a bejeweled turtle—or anything else—
divine
.

In silence, they continued west toward Columbus Circle where Muriel had every intention of kissing her sister good-bye.

R
ISING UP LIKE
two giant flasks, Time Warner Center on the western curve of Columbus Circle is a vertical mall. Whole Foods fills the basement, a twenty-five-million-dollar penthouse kisses the sky. In between are chic, expensive retail shops into which Muriel Sullivant would never set foot.

“Window-shop with me,” Pia said as they neared the intersection between shopping and the bus home.

“I already have a window.” Muriel leaned in to kiss-kiss Pia’s cheeks and ask, “You know how to get to Grand Central, right?”

“Don’t make me go home just yet.” Pia’s purging had completely sobered her up. In the bright sunlight, however, Muriel did notice that her beautiful sister was pale in a yellowish sort of way. Her eyes seemed more deeply set into their sockets. Shopping was the last thing she needed and the very last thing Muriel wanted. Now or ever.

“Not today, Pia. I have, um, stuff to do.”

“Ten minutes,
max.
Please.”

Muriel stopped and looked at her full on. “What is
with
you?”

Pia sighed. “I was hoping you would be. My little sis. Whom I see so seldomly.” With the confidence of a woman who is never denied, Pia marched straight for the entrance to the vertical mall before Muriel had a chance to process the
Brady Bunch
way in which her sister was now frequently using the word “sis.” Yes, the day had been odd, indeed.

“You could use a new pair of shoes, Muriel,” Pia tossed over her shoulder. “If you can call those things on your feet
shoes
.”

And her original sister was back.

Of course Muriel followed. As she always did. She plodded along in her cheap peep-toe shoes, which, she suddenly noticed, really belonged on an elderly woman’s feet.

Inside the mall Muriel balanced herself on the escalator by resting her wrists on the handrail. Germs didn’t care if you were in an upscale mall or not. She asked Pia, “Looking for something in particular?” Then she inhaled the sickening sweetness of the overly perfumed air. Pia smiled her angelic smile and meandered, floor by floor, standing in front of one softly lit window display after another. Right foot jutted out, left hand on her chin, tilting her head this way and that, she seemed intent on evaluating every damn mannequin in the mall. Sis Big Foot stood loyally behind her.

“What do you think?” Pia asked, finally. “Like it?” She pointed to a placid-faced mannequin wearing an elegant gray satin sleeveless dress.

“It’s you,” Muriel said, honestly.

“I think so, too.”

Muriel was stunned. Together, they walked into the store.

“Can I help you ladies find anything?” A toothy twentysomething approached them the moment they set foot through the door. Muriel said, “Could you please show me your size sixteens?”