The Better Liar(85)

    So it stuck in my head that the one time she treated us like people was the day that our mother was due to return from her sojourn away. She taught us to make snowflakes from sheets of construction paper. We made boxes full, pink and yellow, and when my parents came through the front door at last, we flung the snowflakes in the air like confetti, so that they clung to my mother’s perm and the yellow bouquet in her arms, souvenirs of our devotion.

My mother went to Lakeview two more times, and by the third time Grandma Betty was dead and we didn’t throw snowflakes anymore.

Robin was a long-legged eight years old, almost nine, when Christine returned. My dad was working all the time back then, sometimes sleeping at his office, and Grandma Betty had died the year before, so there was no one to take care of us. But the decade was different as well. A twelve-year-old was babysitting age; I was plenty old enough to care for Robin, who could ride a bike and make frozen dinners.

After that winter, Robin was not well liked by the nearby fourth-graders, so she spent all her time with me, something that was only now starting to grate on me. She was odd—watched old movies on TV and had recently started speaking in a fake mid-Atlantic accent and wearing clip-on paste earrings from the dollar store. When she wasn’t imitating Barbara Stanwyck, she was imitating me. It was something little sisters were supposed to do, so it might have soothed me, but she was uncomfortably possessive in her love, crawling across the room and into my bed at night, sleeping clutched to my arm with her hand in my hair. I couldn’t have my newest school friend, Diane Gomez, over without her listening in. We could see the white lumps of her sock-clad feet in the crack of space between the door and the carpet. Later, she’d make me list all the reasons I liked her better than Diane.

I did like her better than Diane, but I wanted space.

So that day I’d locked the door to our bedroom from the outside and gone into the backyard to lie on the tile with my shirt pulled up to my fleshy infant belly, trying to get an April tan before any of the other girls in class had one. Christine had been in the bathroom for three hours, taking one of her interminable baths, which I only later realized were influenced by the pills the hospital had given her. I’d been out there for an hour when I heard a cracking noise and saw Robin braced in the window, pushing up the painted-shut sill. “Leslie!” she called.

    I twisted around to look at her. “You broke the window!”

“I did not.” She was half out of the house, one thin insect leg hanging down.

“It was sealed!”

“It came up when I yanked.” She tumbled out and brushed the dust off her denim skort. “I was tired of being in our room. Can I tan with you?”

“No,” I said, but she ran over to my side and spread-eagled out next to me anyway, pulling her shirt up too. I sighed. “Is she still in the bathtub?”

There were three women in the house, but only one she.

Robin nodded. “I think she’s gonna do it again,” she added. “I mean, not today.”

“I know what you mean.” Christine had always looked through us, like Grandma Betty, but now it was like there was nobody looking at all. She had given up speaking. The second time she’d gone to Lakeview, Daddy had told us she was going to learn to toughen up, but she had come back just the same, if not worse: sleeping all the time, not answering the door. Going to the grocery store required hours of getting ready, and sometimes she’d decide it was too late to go by then, and we’d order a pizza and hide the box in our neighbors’ trash can so Daddy wouldn’t see it.

Was I angry at her? Yes and no. I had never really been able to put into words what it was like to grow up as we did. Robin was the only one who understood, and that day in the backyard was the last time we would ever really speak to each other for the rest of our childhood. What it came down to, I thought, was that other children had been taught to have an interiority. Their parents tried to befriend them, encouraged them in having preferences, even down to what foods they would and would not try, appealed to their reason when rules were flouted. In our house, no adults ever bothered to justify themselves to children; the idea had a hippie tinge to it. To Daddy, having been raised by Grandma Betty, children were not really people, only people-in-training. There was little to do with them but wait for them to become reasonable.

    When no one discusses your feelings, it never really occurs to you that you might have feelings. I did have feelings, of course, but sitcom ones, learned from TV and Are You There God? and church once a year. For the most part these shallow affectations were sufficient for any situation a twelve-year-old from the suburbs could find herself in, but every once in a while something unidentifiable would pass just beneath my consciousness, like the shadow of some enormous sea creature under the tiny bobbing craft above.

I said, “I don’t understand why she can’t do it.”

Robin was not really listening by this time, having gotten bored of tanning in the few minutes I’d spent lost in thought. She was crouched on the patio, upending her box of chalk. “Do you remember when it snowed?” she asked me.

“I wish she were already dead,” I said contemplatively. “Right now, it’s kind of like we’re all just waiting and nobody’s doing anything about it. And I never know what to say to people who ask, because Daddy doesn’t want…you know, it’d be easier to say, ‘She died.’ At least people understand that.”