Dead Letters(37)

When you figure it out, you’ll know where to look.


Your inspired, innovative, indefatigable sister,

Z is for Zelda



—

I roll out of Zelda’s bed feeling groggy, as well as deeply annoyed. Zelda’s trailer has turned into a sauna. I’m surprised she doesn’t have an air conditioner down here, though not entirely: Zelda loves extremes. I’ve napped for several hours, and my hangover is largely dissipated, though Zelda’s most recent communiqué has left me feeling nauseous and irritable. Goddamn her. I don’t want to play her fucking game. But it’s too late. I’m already all in, and she knows it. She understands that the reason I never played games is because I have to win. I am my mother’s child, and I can’t handle defeat. Zelda is fully aware that she’s enticed me to play, and now I can’t let it go until I’ve figured her out, found her, looked her in the eyes and told her that I know her BEST, that I GET HER. Which, of course, is how she will win too. Zelda never plays a game she’s not certain of winning.

As kids, we were always wary of playing against each other, of competing; someone else was always on the opposing side. We refused to beat each other. For us, no card games or long rainy days filled with Monopoly or chess. Whenever there was a game of tag or capture the flag at a birthday party, we were always on the same team, and we would win. No matter what. Zelda once chipped a little girl’s tooth, refusing to be taken prisoner in capture the flag. During one obsessive summer, she got her hands on an old Nintendo and played The Legend of Zelda alone in her room—she was fascinated with the heroine who bore her name, and at some point she wanted all of us to call her Hylia. She wouldn’t let me near the game.

Once, disastrously, we played Scrabble. We were in ninth grade. So certain was I of winning, with my clever, bookish brain, that I sat down in front of my sister with nary a qualm. I excelled at school, got fabulous grades and glowing reports from teachers, while Zelda terrorized them and turned in homework on a schedule that could only be described as capricious. Confident of my success, I agreed to a dangerous bet, certain that I wouldn’t have to honor it. Zelda played a lackadaisical first few words (harp, try, gasp) until I was lulled into complacency. She then swept back into the game with dazzling ease, tossing down big scorers (gherkins, blowzy, and, distressingly, za). I challenged this last word, which she had slapped on a double letter score, only to meet Zelda’s smug expression as she handed me the dictionary.

“There’s no way you could have known this is a valid Scrabble word,” I pointed out, trying to get a handle on my rage. I was realizing just how effectively she had played me.

“You thought I knew nothing about the game, little sis,” she said. “Always assuming I’m all loosey-goosey. But I’ve recently become a prodigy.” She leaned back in her chair and informed me that as the loser, I would have to buy weed from her extremely dodgy older friend and smoke a whole joint in the middle of the dining room while Nadine was upstairs. She wanted me to break the rules, which I always followed to the letter. I did, and was miserable. We never played Scrabble again.

I honestly don’t know if Zelda would really have put us on opposing teams now. She’s been angry at me, that’s clear, but I still feel that we’re both working for the same objective, heading toward the same goal. Not knowing what that goal really is makes me nervous.

Reluctantly, I turn my mind to her email, and what she wants me to think. She’s right: The first thing that leapt to mind when she asked what I feared most was those god-awful sturgeon. Wyatt told me later that they were a rural legend, that of course there weren’t actually any gigantic forty-foot fish slowly slicing their way through the dark waters of the lake, four hundred feet down. That they obviously never swam up to the surface to feed, that they weren’t attracted by the sound of human legs churning through the water. He said my dad had just been teasing me, like he always did, like dads do, trying to get a reaction. That he’d succeeded this time but I shouldn’t let him win by being terrified of the water. I knew that Wy was speaking good sense, but for a long time after that day, I wouldn’t go in over my head in the lake. Zelda’s right about another thing: I don’t remember her jumping in to rescue me. I remember watching later as she frolicked in the water, seal-like and almost too far from the shore to see. Unafraid and able to do something I was now too frightened to.

I’ve never feared my mother, exactly. I knew from an early age that she was a formidable foe, and I had no desire to anger her. In fact, I eventually learned that I didn’t want to attract her attention at all. I was safer when she wasn’t watching me, when her notice was fixed on someone else. If she never noticed me sitting there, just out of sight, her sharp words would never be directed toward me, and her blind fury would be aimed elsewhere. Usually toward Zelda, who seemed rather to thrive on the rage, the cruel taunts, the endless harping. Zelda used our mother’s wrath as fuel; she held it inside her and unleashed it when she needed a blitzkrieg of her own. Zelda never avoided proximity to our mother; she sought it out. When she saw Nadine getting ratty, Zelda would provoke her, taunt her. As I shrank away from our mother, Zelda would go on the offensive. I always assumed it was her combative spirit, but maybe Zelda was trying to protect me, to attract Nadine’s rage so that I would be spared. And I learned to retreat, to avoid engaging anyone, because it always led to conflict.