“They never even tried to like him,” she said, hitting the gas to pass a slow-moving school bus. “They hated him on sight. But it was never really about him. They had already decided they wanted me to be chaste, go to college, and be a lawyer. It was always about what they wanted.” Then she hit the volume on the radio, cranking it up to drown herself out.
We drove on, and a second later she reached forward, turning the sound down again. “I mean,” she added angrily, “they’d already, like, decided exactly what I was supposed to do, and be, for God’s sake. I never even had a say in anything.”
I nodded as she twisted the volume up, the speakers rattling around us. We drove on, whisking past the dairy farm at the top of the road, the smell of cows and manure wafting in through the open window.
“And now,” she said, reaching impatiently to cut off the radio altogether as we bumped down the dirt road to her house, “they’re so disappointed in me. Like I’ve let them down by not doing everything they planned. I can see it in their faces. Like waiting tables is so awful. I’m not costing them anything, for God’s sake. I mean, I can’t even afford to go to the dentist, but do I ask them for help?”
“No,” I said as she yanked the wheel and we sputtered to a stop behind Dave’s truck.
“No,” she repeated. “Exactly. I don’t.” She got out of the car, grabbed her one bag of groceries, and slammed the door. I followed her up the steps into the house, where Dave was sitting on the couch in jeans and a Spam T-shirt, an open bag of Fritos on his lap.
“Hey there,” he said cheerfully as she brushed past him into the kitchen, the door swinging shut behind her. I could hear her bracelets clanking as she moved around, putting things away, cabinet doors banging shut, one by one. Dave, with one Frito halfway to his mouth, raised his eyebrows.
“We saw her mom at the store,” I explained.
“Oh,” he said, popping it into his mouth. “How’d that go?”
“Shit!” Corinna said loudly, as something crashed and broke in the kitchen. “Goddammit.”
“Not so good,” I told him.
He sighed, standing up. “Here,” he said, handing off the Fritos to me. “I’m going in.”
I watched as he pushed the kitchen door open. It started to swing shut behind him before catching on the stubborn piece of kitchen tile that poked up at the edge of the threshold. He walked over to where Corinna was standing, crying, holding a piece of broken plate in her hand.
“This fell,” she said, holding it up as proof. “I didn’t drop it.”
“I know,” he said, taking it out of her hand and putting it on the counter. “It’s okay.”
She wiped at her eyes, impatiently. Then she said, “I hate that I let her do this to me. It’s so dysfunctional.”
“It’s not your fault,” Dave said as Corinna closed her eyes, leaning her face against his chest, and I felt bad for watching, turning my attention to the Brady Bunch rerun on the TV.
I wondered again if this was what Cass’s life was like with Adam in New York. I hoped so. Even if she was struggling and living off Ramen-noodle soup, it seemed perfect to be in this kind of love.
Corinna was still crying, even as Dave kissed her forehead and smiled, taking one of her hands and twirling her around the small, paint-peeling kitchen. “Stop,” she said, half-laughing as he dipped her over the garbage can. “David, honestly.”
He was humming something, a song I didn’t know, as he twirled her out, then pulled her back, scooping an arm around her waist, and led her into an exaggerated tango, both of them stepping expertly over the dog bowl.
“You’re crazy,” she said, but now she was smiling.
Outside the window over my shoulder it was winter, flat and gray. But in the kitchen, under the warm bulb light, they were still dancing, laughing, twirling across the tiny floor while those silver bracelets jingled, making music all their own.
My mother was still buying dolls and glued to the Lamont Whipper Show daily, where she caught glimpses of Cass every once in a while. Adam, however, she saw every day, since at least one fistfight or hair pulling incident occurred on each show. He was always bounding onstage, grabbing wives off their cheating husbands or separating angry drag queens while the crowd roared in the background.
She was also writing Cass each week, and although she hadn’t heard back yet, there’d been four hang-ups so far on our phone, all coming during the official O’Koren dinnertime: six to six-thirty. My mother would throw down her napkin and run to grab the phone, then stand there saying hello again and again, her fingers gripping white around the receiver, before finally replacing it and walking slowly back to the table. She’d sit down, not saying anything, while my father and I watched her, the only sound the scraping of forks against plates.
“Margaret,” my father would say, finally. “It’s probably just some long-distance company—”
“She almost said something that time,” my mother would blurt out. “I could hear her breathing. She wants to talk to me. I can feel it.”
This was probably true. Cass had always been easily homesick. Even when we went to camp as teenagers she’d bawled at the bus station. I knew the only reason she hadn’t gotten in touch so far was just because she was afraid my parents would somehow force her to come home. Even as I imagined her making Hamburger Helper without the hamburger with Adam in New York, being madly in love, I knew my sister, and I was sure she missed us.
On Saturday afternoons, I went to the Arts Center with my mother and Boo for photography class. I’d regretted agreeing to it almost instantly—mostly because between cheering and school I didn’t see Rogerson as much as I wanted, to begin with—but in time I found that I actually liked the class. The instructor was a young, energetic photographer named Matthew, who sported a scraggly goatee, as well as a seemingly endless number of tattered wool sweaters. He gestured excitedly, eyes sparkling, as he guided us through the first few discussions on light, focus, perspective, and setting. Then he just set us loose in different places—Topper Lake, the old graveyard, the supermarket—encouraging us to “create our own personal vision” of each.
At the supermarket, for instance, my mother spent the full hour in the floral section, trying to get the perfect shot of the rows of cut flower bins, while Boo went for the abstract, selecting a round, bright, yellow squash and arranging it on the meat counter, right next to a freshly cut set of bloody steaks. “Contrast,” Matthew proclaimed excitedly, as she circled the meat with her camera, getting it from every angle. “Make us think about your meaning!”
I myself was sorely lacking for inspiration. I contemplated the rows of milk bottles—white, smooth, cold—but moved on when I saw two people from our class already there, taking identical pictures from the same angle. Should I do the bored lobsters in their tank? Seek deep introspection in the cheese aisle? I was beginning to lose hope.
“Five minutes, people!” Matthew called out as he passed me. “We’ll regroup by customer service, okay?”
Five minutes. I was getting desperate and had decided to go back to the milk when I walked past the frozen foods. It was empty except for an elderly woman with her cart, who was pulling a door open to get out a frozen dinner. She was small and frail, with skin almost translucent and made whiter by the bright fluorescent lights overhead. I started up the aisle toward her, popping the lens cap off my camera, already lifting it to my eye and adjusting the zoom so that her profile took up the entire frame. Then she leaned in, reaching forward, and as her breath came out in a sudden, small white puff, she closed her eyes, reacting to the cold. I snapped the picture, catching her in that one instant with a simple click.
The next week, when we did our developing, I stood and watched as her image emerged in front of me: distinct, perfect, in all that cool white. Matthew held it up for the class to see and congratulated me on my “sense of face.” For me, it was the first thing I’d done in a long time that I was truly proud of, so much so that I hung it on my mirror, repla
cing my second-place ribbons and B honor roll certificates.
But even as I was doing well in photography, things were going from bad to worse in my cheerleading career. Choosing Rogerson over Mike Evans had been the beginning of the end, but now I was so busy with him that I just didn’t have the energy for pyramids and dance routines anymore. This was added to the fact that Corinna’s was about a mile from school, so I often headed there for the half hour between last period and practice. Corinna was usually in her Applebee’s uniform, lazily putting on her makeup and various SIZZZZZLE STEAKS! and ASK ME ABOUT SUPERCHOCOLATESUNDAES! buttons. I’d throw down my backpack and take my place on the couch, where we’d share a bowl, smoke some cigarettes (I was buying my own packs now), and watch General Hospital, some sleazy talk show, or another infomercial. This, of course, usually made me lose any motivation I had for cheerleading. If I even made it to practice afterward—and increasingly, I didn’t—I was usually so tired and lazy it was all I could do to go through the motions.
The only thing worthwhile about practice was that I got to see Rina, who was currently embroiled in one of her trademark mucky love triangles. This one involved her quarterback, Bill Skerrit, a nice aw-shucks kind of guy who honestly believed he and Rina were going to get married, and the college-boy shoe salesman, Jeff, who Rina had met a month earlier when she’d gone to return a pair of platform sandals. Bill Skerrit had already bought Rina a friendship ring, which she wasn’t wearing, and Jeff was a dog and never called her when he said he would. Of course, she was mad for him.
“Oh, God,” she’d say to me as we sat outside the gym after practice. “I don’t want to be like this, you know?”
“Like what?” I’d say.
“Like such a total bitch. I mean, poor Bill, you know?”
Bill, who assumed he and Rina were both saving themselves for marriage, had not the slightest inkling that she was, ahem, involved with Jeff. I’d only met him once, at the mall. He was tall, with a big floppy shock of blond hair he was always getting out of his face by jerking his head suddenly to the side, whiplash-style. Rina found this incredibly sexy. It made me nervous.
During all of this I was also spending as much time as I could with Rogerson, who still complained that I wasn’t around enough. My grades kept slipping as he talked me into going out with him every night, always sweet-talking me into it the same way he coaxed me out of the house. And the nights when he just showed up, not talking, just wanting me to sit with him while he recovered from something he wouldn’t even discuss, became more and more frequent. I noticed bruises on his face, red marks and puffiness around his eyes, but he shrugged off my concern, dodging it gracefully, again. I felt desperately helpless, unable to protect him from some awful force I couldn’t even name. It kept me up nights, long after I’d watched him drive away.
I was running from one problem or place to another, with no time left to study, or sleep, or just breathe. I felt pulled in all directions, fighting to keep all these obligations circling in the air above me. It was only a matter of time before something fell.
It was the Friday of the Winter Athletic Ceremony that it happened. After last period I was supposed to go to a cheerleading meeting, then home to meet Rogerson, who wanted me to go to the mall to help him buy a birthday gift for his mother. After that, I would return home to shower, change, and ride back to school with my parents and Boo and Stewart for the ceremony, where I’d get a corsage from some football player. This would be followed by us all sitting through an endlessly boring speech by Principal Hawthorne detailing the “virtue of competition” and the “lessons we learn from teamwork” that we’d all heard the year before, and the year before that, while we waited for Cass to get her trophies. Finally I would be given a cheap plaque, my mother would take about a dozen pictures (in all of which I would have a partial—or no—head) and somehow, eventually, it would be over.
By 3:15, it was clear I needed something to help me get through this. I drove to Corinna’s with one eye on the clock, just wanting a few minutes of peace.
When I got there she was in her uniform—today, her button said SUPER STEAKS! THE NEW SENSATION!—and rolling change on the coffee table while watching reruns of the Newlywed Game.
“I have to make at least a hundred bucks tonight after tipping out,” she explained as I sat down, taking the bowl as she passed it to me, the lighter balanced on top of it. Now she didn’t even bother to ask me before she packed it—we had a routine, a system. Rogerson had even begun to give me my own small supply of pot, as well as a bowl, tiny and white ceramic with a wizard painted on its tip. With it, my bag, cigarettes, and a lighter, I was like Barbie all over again, just with different accessories.
Now Corinna exhaled, blowing out smoke as she stacked pennies, tucking her hair behind her ear. “Dave’s out of work at least till next week and the power bill’s due Monday. Plus I wrote a check for groceries that’s gonna bounce if I don’t deposit something tonight.”
I took the bowl and lit it, watching as one of the couples on the TV won a new bedroom suite. The woman had seventies hair, all hairspray and feathered bangs, and was jumping up and down, kissing the host. “I’m sorry,” I said. “That sucks.”
“Yeah, well,” she said, piling pennies into a roll and twisting the ends shut. “We’ll make it somehow. We always do.”
Corinna always seemed to be working, but I never could quite figure out what Dave did, exactly. He seemed to do some carpentry work, sometimes, and for a week or two he worked at the Quik Zip, selling gas and cigarettes on the night shift. More often, however, he was in the next room sleeping, where I could hear him snoring sometimes as Corinna and I spoke in whispers so as not to wake him. I was learning that with Dave, as with Rogerson, it was best just not to ask questions.
After we’d finished smoking I glanced at the clock: four sharp. The meeting was beginning, and I could just see Chelsea Robbins taking her spot in front of the assembled squad, decreeing who would be escorted by which football player at the banquet. It seemed like a long way back to school, suddenly, and I wondered if anyone had noticed yet that I wasn’t there.
Corinna looked up from stacking dimes. “Aren’t you late for practice?”
I thought of Mike Evans pinning a corsage on my chest and leading me to the stage while my mother snapped pictures that would never come out. “Nope,” I said, settling back into the couch. “Don’t have it today.”
She picked up the remote and flipped a few stations until the phone rang, leaving it on a commercial for car wax as she got up to snatch the cordless off the top of the TV. She walked into the kitchen, lowering her voice, as I heard Dave mumble something, asleep, from behind the half-open door to my right that led to the bedroom.
Then I heard music I recognized. It was yet another Lamont Whipper rerun coming on. It was so popular that now they’d added yet another showing, making my mother that much happier. I watched as the camera zoomed in on Lamont himself, holding his microphone. He announced the day’s topic—“Better Run While You Can, ’Cause You’ve Been Messing with My Man!” Cass was standing behind him.
She was wearing a brown sweater and jeans, her hair up and twisted into a hasty bun behind her head, held in place with a pencil, the old Boo trick. She was holding a clipboard, her eyes glancing quickly around the studio, checking something I couldn’t see. As her gaze moved across the audience, she stared right into the camera for one instant, and it was suddenly like she was looking right at me. And as she did, she lifted a finger and smoothed it across her eyebrow, turning her head slightly.
I felt a slow, creeping chill crawl up the back of my neck just as Corinna came back through the door, turning the phone off with an angry jab of her finger. “Oh, so listen to this crap. The five-thirty wait called in sick with a freakin’ hangover, so I’m on my own till six. On a Friday, no less.” She sighed, sitting back down and shaking a cigarette out of the open pack next to her stacks of coins. “Can you believe that?”
“No
,” I said softly, as the camera switched angles to focus on the first guest, a huge black woman in a brightly printed pantsuit. I lit a cigarette and drew in hard, my vision spinning for a second.
“Whatever. I have got to get out of this crappy job. It’s about to kill me.” Corinna glanced at the TV. “What’s this?”
“Lamont Whipper,” I said.
“Oh, I hate that show,” she moaned, picking up the remote. “It’s like white trash on parade. Do you mind if I change—”
“Wait,” I said quickly, as the camera shot back to Lamont, who was now asking a thin blond woman in a Harley-Davidson T-shirt her opinion. “Just one second.”
And there was Cass again, this time scribbling something on her clipboard while a guy in headphones leaned down to whisper something in her ear. Then she smiled, shaking her head, and I thought of my mother sitting at home, her chair pulled up to the screen, smiling back.
“Caitlin,” Corinna said. She was watching my face. “What is it?”
Now, on-screen, Cass glanced back up, brushing her bangs out of her face with the back of her hand. “That’s my sister,” I said quietly.
“Where?”
“Right there. Against the wall, in the brown,” I said as Cass hugged the clipboard against her chest.
“Oh, man, really?” Corinna said, leaning in closer to study the screen. “Look at that. Wow. You never even said you had a sister.”
That was strange. Cass had always been such a big part of what I was, but I hadn’t mentioned her—not even once. I wondered what she would think if she really could look through the TV and see me sitting there stoned, not recognizing the girl beside me or the place I was or even, maybe, me. I thought of the other Cassandra, the one she’d been named for, the girl who could see her own future. And I wondered if this future—Lamont Whipper and Adam and New York and leaving us behind—was the one she’d seen for herself. Or for me.