I went into Dom’s.
Dom’s does not have any New England atmosphere. It doesn’t have any atmosphere at all that I can see. I sat at the counter between an elderly woman carrying a shopping bag and a cute construction worker with one arm in a sling. The three of us slouched over cold drinks.
“Hi, Beethoven,” said a male voice.
It was Anthony.
“Just wanted to let you know I’ll be ready to help if you run into any problems as music editor,” said Anthony. “I’m going to be troubleshooting for Shepherd, you know.”
Sheppie could shoot her own troubles, but I would come up with almost anything to have Anthony around. “Thank you,” I said. There was no place next to me for Anthony to sit and I could think of nothing to say that would keep him standing in the aisle. The construction worker, bless his heart, grinned at me, dropped several quarters on the counter, and shifted to a booth. Some people are saints.
Anthony sat beside me. The nude calendar idea came back to mind. I squashed the thought. It was hard enough to breathe already.
Ordering a side of French fries, he said, “What do you think of Danenburg? She’s supposed to be so terrific but so far Brit lit is the most boring class I’ve ever had.”
Poor Danenburg didn’t know what to say about literature, so she just read aloud from the assignments. She was pitiful. “She just likes the sound of her own voice,” I said.
“Don’t we all?” Anthony poured so much ketchup over his fries that they vanished.
“You eat your fries with a spoon?” I said.
He grinned. “Actually the fries are just a method of carrying ketchup to my mouth.”
We flirted, sharing ketchup-coated French fries and sipping Coke diluted with too much ice. I felt a crush coming on, and let it. Who deserved it more?
“Want a ride home?” said Anthony casually.
Anthony would flirt with any girl. But he would not offer just anybody a ride home. Heart pounding, I said, “That would be lovely.” I thought, this is Thursday. Perfect timing for Anthony to ask me out for Saturday.
He paid for my Coke and left a lavish tip. We walked out together, Anthony behind me, holding both my shoulders. He half massaged and half guided, keeping the physical connection he seemed to need with everybody. I winked at the cute construction worker and he lifted two fingers in a victory salute. The construction worker and I had plans, even if Anthony didn’t.
Anthony took my hand and we walked to his car. It meant nothing to him. He was not capable of walking next to a girl without doing that. But it meant a lot to me.
We’d driven one block when he said, “But I don’t know where you live.”
“Off Iron Mine Road.”
“I always wondered if there was a real iron mine.”
“Oh, yes. My sister and I used to play there.”
He stared at me. “Your sister? Ashley? I can’t picture her playing anything but a guitar. She used to play outside, like in dirt and mud and stuff?”
“She was a real person once.”
Anthony shook his head. “I’ll never forget that concert she gave three years ago. I swear that was real dried blood all over her. I was terrified of her. But she was so good! What a musician! And her act. Like raw sex. Must have been weird for your parents.”
“It was a little weird for me, too.”
Anthony kept shaking his head. “You’re so conservative,” he said. “And your sister was so—so—”
“Unusual,” I supplied.
“That’s one way to put it.”
“A safe way.”
Anthony gave me a very gentle look, and for a moment I felt something beyond physical attraction between us: real understanding. I had been floating in a daydream I knew I was a daydream, but now it was pierced by hope. How often does a relative stranger understand a problem as intense as mine? Truly there could be something between Anthony and me—something that was …
But the moment ended too quickly to be sure and I did not know how to continue it. Anthony was totally occupied with locating Iron Mine Road. We don’t have signs in our town. The feeling is that you should be born knowing where the roads are.
A rusted-out dark green car drifted toward the same turn. Its back left door was gone, and the hole was covered with black plastic that had torn and was flapping. The license plate was a piece of cardboard with numbers carelessly Magic Markered on. The exhaust pipe dragged on the asphalt, sending out sparks of fire and clouds of smoke.
“I hate cars like that,” I said, shivering. “It’s like evil, driving into your life.”
Anthony grinned. “Well, you’re safe in here with me, Susan.”
Susan. Not Beethoven, that unsuitable nickname, but Susan. The real me. I felt very attached to Anthony, our real names holding us together.
We passed the repulsive car, which was having difficulty negotiating the curve. The driver was filthy and sickening. He was wearing several sweatshirts and the hoods were stacked up at the back of his neck, as though his heads were layered. His passenger was an emaciated-looking woman with stringy blonde hair, wearing a thin blue sweater and a necklace of pearls that appeared to have been torn apart on purpose, so they hung in silver shreds on her flat chest.
“Here’s Iron Mine,” I said.
Anthony turned.
Memory stabbed me like knives. I turned swiftly to glance behind us.
The emaciated woman in the awful car behind us was Ashley.
Anthony talked of twisting narrow Connecticut roads and deep dangerous Connecticut potholes. We hit one, and the car lurched like my soul.
I kept staring behind us.
“Don’t worry about that car,” said Anthony. “Driver’s probably on something. He’s going slow—we’re ahead of him. Nothing’s going to happen.”
Nothing’s going to happen.
The words of a person who did not know Ashley.
We approached our neighborhood. The road widened and a dozen houses sprinkled the rocky valley. Mrs. Bond was weeding her budding chrysanthemum bed, soon to be a shower of vermilion and gold. In his driveway Timmy Ames was trying out the training wheels on his new bike. Behind the house Timmy’s sister was trying to sink a basket in the hoop attached to their barn. A kid I didn’t recognize was mowing the McLeans’ lawn.
All so normal.
Behind us the rusty green car wove a crazed pattern down the wrong side of the road.
I didn’t know which would be worse—the homecoming of Trash or Anthony’s witnessing her arrival.
Anthony’s life was one of predictable wealth and position. His mother had been a Shepherd in her day. His father was a colleague of Emily’s father, and equally successful. Anthony knew nothing of the underside of life. He probably thought having a sister like Ashley was romantic.
The real Ashley was another thing altogether.
I had approximately twenty seconds in which to get rid of Anthony.
Right now, I suddenly perceived, I was the woman of mystery I had pretended to be in front of the mirror. A girl whose older sister was a vanished rock star; a girl to whom Shepherd Grenville deferred, saying she was full of hidden creativity.
Dear God, let Anthony keep thinking of me that way, I prayed. “Wonderful of you thanks a million Anthony got to run look there’s my mother in the door worried because I’m so late see you tomorrow.” I flung myself out of the car, slammed the door hard against his last words and ran up the path beside the overhanging lilacs.
My mother, in the dark behind the screen door, looked confused. But not as confused as Anthony. Down the road the rusted-out car was gaining. Anthony stared at me and did not drive away.
I turned my back on him.
Wonderful. Wonderful ending to my fantasies.
Girl flees company of boy. Boy senses he is not wanted. Romance will not continue in this episode or the next.
Anthony drove away. I would have wept if I had not already been bracing myself for Ashley. I was going to warn my
mother, I was going to hold her first, and say it carefully, but there was no time. The green car landed in front of the house. It did not actually stop, but just paused, as if my sister were just so much flotsam and jetsam to be dumped. At least the soiled person with the layered heads was not going to stay with us.
Ashley slid out of the car and stood in the gutter.
The green car wavered on, caught in its own nightmare.
My mother moved stiffly out onto the steps, her hands to her heart, her lips moving soundlessly.
Ashley, Ashley.
Her cry of joy broke the sense of nightmare. Laughing ecstatically, holding out her arms, my mother ran to her older daughter. Joy filled me too. I guess no matter how bad the memories of past homecomings, a homecoming must always mean joy. I went to Ashley too, and we both embraced her, and we kept repeating the syllables of her name and crushing her to us, and feeling the boniness of her thin body in our arms.
Ashley did not hug back. She stood there, waiting for us to be done.
My father appeared and he too could not speak at first, and when he did it was a whisper. “Ashley, honey,” he breathed, and when he reached his daughter, he picked her up, because he is a huge man and she was tiny and fragile. “Welcome home sweetheart,” he said, his voice breaking, and he set her down.
“Hello,” she said, rather irritably, brushing us away like mosquitoes. She walked on into the house.
It struck me that she had nothing with her.
Nothing.
No suitcase. No purse. Not even pockets.
Ashley had gone out to conquer the world. She had come home with literally nothing. We, with our eight rooms, our closets, attics, drawers, and boxes. Our three sheds, our garage, our two acres.
My very own sister did not even have a toothbrush.
Dad held the screen door for Mom and me. A queer thing happened. We three did not look at one another. It was as if we were afraid to see what the others were thinking. We were waiting. Waiting to see who, and what, this year’s Ashley Elizabeth Hall might be.
Three
I FOLLOWED ASHLEY INTO the kitchen. You’re not really home until you get to the kitchen. A front hall is just a corridor, but a kitchen is home. Even Ashley knew it. She walked slowly around the old pine table, its finish long gone from generations of scrubbing, and squeezed into the narrow place where the fourth chair was jammed.
We were a three-person family using a table that, naturally, had four sides, and therefore four chairs. But the fourth chair was just a place to set groceries on, or library books. Ashley went to that fourth chair like an animal seeking its lair, and when she sat down she sagged, as if all energy had left her forever. The chair was not merely an awkwardly placed shelf. It was hers.
This burned-out woman was not the buoyant happy girl who cuddled me when I was little. Nor the crazed violent girl with the shaved skull. This was a third person entirely.
The memory of her own chair was all she had for her twenty-fifth birthday.
“I’m glad you’re back, Ashley,” I said to her.
No reaction.
I sat down in my chair, next to hers, and leaned forward, putting my hand on her bony knee. “I’ve missed you.”
Now she looked up. Her eyes were dark in an impossibly white face and the circles beneath them were not from makeup. “You didn’t miss me,” she said. Her voice was brittle and sharp. It went well with her body. “Any more than I missed you. Don’t offer me charity. I won’t take it. I’ll just hate you for it.”
I jerked back as if she had scalded me, which satisfied her. What a first sentence for her to utter! I put my hand awkwardly on my own knee and looked nervously at my parents, who were standing in the kitchen door. They exchanged sick looks.
But I too hated charity. I had not liked it one bit when the trig class offered to help dear stupid Susan. How strange, I thought. Ashley and I have that in common, then. Sisterhood is in there somewhere. We just have to locate it.
Because this was no rock star dropping in between engagements. This was no victorious career woman spending a night between New York and Boston.
This was defeat.
My parents sat down with us and I knew in a moment my mother was going to do poorly. Joy combined with nerves made her dithery. It was the kind of thing I could overlook, but Ashley never overlooked anything. “How nice you look!” piped my mother to the daughter who looked dreadful. “I’ve always liked pearls. I’m so glad to see you wearing pearls.” She actually clapped her hands a little, to demonstrate how glad she was.
Ashley was utterly contemptuous. “The pearls are fake,” she said in a voice that dripped sarcasm, just as the pearls themselves dripped in ugly tangles from her throat. “They explode when I touch them. Shower the fans with acid.”
My mother gasped, too horrified to see the exaggeration.
“That’s nothing,” I said to Ashley. “I have rubies that throw knives.”
My father grinned. My mother stared at me in confused anxiety. Ashley’s face merely quivered. I did not know what that meant, but it was preferable to the sagging emptiness.
The timer on the stove rang gently. All the sounds in my mother’s house are gentle, from the doorbell to the clothes dryer timer. I thought, she’s the one we have to worry about, with Ashley here. Not Ash, but Mom.
“Dinner,” said my mother tensely, as though “dinner” were yet another appalling guest. She glanced around helplessly, unable to imagine what step to take next.
“I’ll fix it,” I said. “You talk to Ashley.”
I got the pot roast out of the oven, spooned off some fat and began beating flour into it for gravy. My mother folded her hands like a little girl and put on a bright voice to match. You could almost see her dressing a little Ashley for dancing class. “Well, darling! How have you been?”
“How does it look?” said Ashley.
Mom withered.
“You look good to us, sweetheart,” said my father. Dad is an electrician and a football coach. He has a tendency to talk as if he’s in a perpetual halftime meeting. “You’re alive and you’re home,” he said, as if priming her for a better quarter. “We’ve done a lot of worrying in the last few years, sweetheart.”
If he thought that would thaw his daughter’s heart, he was wrong. “I’m not your sweetheart,” she said. “Or your team either. And don’t try to lay some guilt trip on me just because you wasted your time worrying.”
Mother cringed, but Daddy simply nodded. In his view you won some and you lost some and you never worried about a play that was over. “Were you in New York?” he asked.
How odd that would be—Ash barely forty miles away all this time! I had pictured her in California, which seemed suitably remote in distance and style.
“I’ve been everywhere,” she said. “Don’t hassle me. I didn’t come home to be interrogated.”
Why did you come home? I wondered. Are you desperate? Hiding?
“Warren, darling,” said my mother nervously, “don’t question her so much. She’s been home only ten minutes.” Mom patted Ashley frantically on the shoulder, the hair, the back. Ashley removed her hands as if they were dead fish.
“I think it’s fairly reasonable for a father to wonder when it’s been twenty-four months since the last communiqué,” Dad pointed out.
“We don’t share reasons,” said my sister. “We never have. Don’t shove me, Warren, and I won’t shove you. I just need a little space. And tomorrow I’ll need the car.”
Her demand was so sudden nobody was prepared for it. I knew they wouldn’t give her the car. I could still remember years ago a high-speed chase on the turnpike that ended when Ashley totaled the car. Nobody got hurt. I don’t remember what punishment Ashley got, if any, from the legal system.
“Don’t call me Warren,” said my father, rather pleasantly, and rather firmly. “And you may not have the car. It’s your mother’s car. When you have a job, and you’re earning money, you can buy your own car.?
??
I finished setting the table and putting the serving dishes out. My mother found the harsh talk unbearable and compensated by getting even more bubbly. “Well, darling,” she said to Ashley in a giddy voice. “What a good night you chose to come home! Pot roast, buttermilk gravy, biscuits, mashed potatoes, and green beans.” She looked at the food happily, and I knew she rejoiced she had made a big dinner. What if Ash had walked in the night we had frozen fish sticks or ordered pizza? But pot roast with buttermilk gravy—that’s homecoming food.
“I can see what you’re having. Don’t run through a menu for me.”
At least she didn’t call my mother “Janey.” I changed the subject, making a real effort not to sound bubbly like Mom or football-coach stern like Dad. “You know what, Ashley?” I said. “It’s my senior year in high school. I’m on the yearbook staff. I’m music editor. And I’m taking trigonometry, and British lit, and—”
“Music editor?” repeated Ashley. “How stupid. There’s nothing to do except get the captions right under the concert choir photographs.”
“That’s exactly what I said, but the editor told me to come up with something innovative and unique.”
“I’ve been doing things that are innovative and unique for years now,” said Ashley, “and none of them would fit into a yearbook.”
My mother definitely did not want to hear about any innovative and unique activities Ashley might have gotten into. “What a nice color sweater you have on, dear,” she said. “I love it on you.”
I almost gave her as disgusted a look as Ashley did. “It’s the only thing the Salvation Army had,” said my sister.
“Oh, honey, why didn’t you call us?” cried my mother. “I would have sent you money! I would have sent you clothing.”
“I didn’t want to hear your voice.”
Another chilling remark. Delivered simply, as one stating an obvious fact—say, that the Atlantic Ocean separates us from Europe. I didn’t want to hear your voice.
Mom began serving pot roast. Her hands were shaking. My father was not looking at Ashley, but at Mom, and rather sadly. Suddenly I knew that my mother was desperate—frantic—for proof that she was not a failed mother. That daughter number one really was a neat little suburbanite underneath it all. But Dad knew better. And his grief was for his wife, not for Ashley.