Caroline pushed her chair away from the table and stood up, her eyes blazing. Until this moment I had always seen Caroline as a mild person, someone who squealed rather than yelled, who labored over friendship bracelets pinned to her knee. But here she was, animated by her sense of injustice, training the full force of her fury onto Noni, whom we generally shielded from any conflict or emotional excess. Now, nearly six years after the Pause had ended, such precautions were perhaps unnecessary, but they had become routine.
“I . . . I . . .” Caroline stammered. Her resolve, so firmly stamped on her face, was not finding its way to her mouth. We watched our sister struggle for the right words. “I . . . I . . . I hate you,” Caroline said to Noni, and then she burst into tears and ran to her room.
A dangerous, damaged silence descended. I glanced sideways at Noni, trying to gauge her mood. But Noni merely sipped her wine, chewed her chop. Our mother was opaque to us, a combination of stubborn principles, disciplined instruction, and distance. It was Caroline who wore her heart on her sleeve. Our mother taught us how to protect ourselves from hurt but not how to determine what might be worth the risk.
Joe was the first to speak. He opened his eyes and said, “Should I apologize? This feels like my fault.”
“No, you should not apologize,” Noni replied in her no-nonsense way. “Just give her some time.” She sipped the last of her wine, then brought her plate to the kitchen and followed Caroline to her room. I could hear her knocking on the door and her patient voice. “Caroline, please let me in. Caro?”
Renee began to clear the table. I helped until the plates were stacked in the dishwasher, the wood wiped clean, Renee in her chair, pulling an acid yellow highlighter thick as a cigar across a page of her calculus book. The smell of meat and steam still lingered in the room. The front door was closed now, the house shut up tight, battened against the buggy spring night. Noni had gained entrance to Caroline’s room at last. I heard an occasional muffled sob, a brief angry shout.
Joe had finished his homework on the bus, he claimed, and stood in the hall, ear pressed to phone. I was on my way to the kitchen to find something more to eat. My chronic hunger was a residue from the Pause. It didn’t matter how much I ate during the day; always at night I’d feel an empty rumbling. As I passed Joe in the hall, he held his hand over the mouthpiece. “Battleship?” he asked me.
I heard a flash of feminine mumble, a giggling laugh.
Fragrant, flounce, hair, tease, pretty, smile, wink, sugar, sweet.
I shrugged. “Sure.”
I set up the game there on the floor of the hall, and we played, sitting cross-legged, facing each other. I ate a salami sandwich. Joe drank two glasses of milk and remained on the phone. He gave the conversation only the barest attention. D9. F10. A13. With each coordinate he placed his hand on the mouthpiece.
“You sank my battleship,” he told me.
“Yee-haw!” I whooped loudly.
Joe frowned and told the girl he needed to go. Feminine protest erupted on the other end. I could hear the tone but not the words: pout, cajoling, Joooooe. I widened my eyes and twirled an index finger at my forehead. Cuckoo, I signaled to Joe. You and all these stupid girls. I vowed then never to be like them, frivolous and weak-willed, with their glossy lips and padded bras, speaking for hours to a boy who only pretended to listen.
Joe kept my gaze. “Holly—” he said into the phone, but she kept interrupting him.
“I’m—”
“Listen—”
“Wait—”
And then he simply hung up.
“Your turn,” I said.
As we continued the game, Joe jiggled a knee, tapped an index finger against the floor, squinted and frowned. Back then some part of Joe was always in motion. A leg, a finger, a crack of the neck, a roll of the shoulders. He was still growing, his bones lengthening, skin expanding, his whole person surging forward into a bright unknown. Joe’s vitality seeped out of him, uncontainable. I felt it all the time.
“Fiona,” he said as we were clearing away the pieces of the game. He had won, but barely.
“What?”
“I’m glad you’re my little sister.”
I shrugged. “It’s not like I have a choice,” I replied, but I felt my big, hot heart spreading through my chest like a starfish, like a many-fingered creature that had finally found its treasure. “Noni wouldn’t let you trade me in anyhow.”
“True,” Joe said, and he grinned back at me, a faint milk mustache still clinging to the delicate blond hairs of his upper lip. He looked beautiful and sated and spent.
* * *
And then, in a heartbeat, with a rattle of Caroline’s armful of bracelets, the squeak of Renee’s running shoes, the funny hiccup of Joe’s laugh, my siblings were leaving home.
—cold, lonesome, lone, together, mother, brother, sister, other—
Picture the day: late summer in New England, humid and close, the lawn thick as shag from Noni’s tending. A day when we would have been at the pond. The year was 1992, and eighteen-year-old Joe was piling suitcases and plastic crates, a secondhand microwave, four pillows, three baseball bats, a life-size cardboard cutout of Bill and Ted into Noni’s Volvo station wagon.
“Do you really need the cardboard thing?” Noni asked, squinting into the sun. Dog-day cicadas whined with a high-pitched keen, a cyclical sound so pervasive you didn’t even notice it until it was all you noticed, and then, at that very moment, the sound began to fade.
“Yes,” Joe said solemnly. He was sweaty, wearing blue nylon shorts and a purple-and-green Mavericks tee. “I need them. I’m pretty sure it was on that list they sent. Books, sheets, Bill and Ted . . .”
“Okay, okay,” said Noni. “Bring Bill and Ted. But don’t blame me if your new roommate asks to switch.” She winked at Joe and slid the poster into the back of the car.
All morning Noni had pranced around like a golden retriever. Alden College! Our mother had won the parental college lottery: not Ivy League but close, with a full financial-aid package. Given Joe’s mediocre grades, no one thought he had a shot at a school like Alden, but Coach Marty knew the baseball coach. Alden needed a freshman center fielder, and Joe Skinner was it.
“Joe, don’t take Bill!” I called from my seat on the front lawn. “I love him!” For the first hour of packing, I had helped, sort of, but the tolerable morning temperature had given way so quickly to a sludgy, heavy heat that I’d declared myself overwhelmed and found a place in the shade. “Just cut Ted off,” I called. “Take Ted, but leave Bill.”
My childhood baby fat had not melted away as we all (or at least I) had assumed it would. That summer I was fifteen years old, alarmingly pudgy from puberty and Coke and frosted doughnuts and a general aversion to physical effort. For three long months, I’d moped around the house, reading too much sexed-up Updike and working a stinky, mindless job at a burger place in Bexley that paid me eight dollars an hour to cut tomatoes and onions and lift buns off the grill before they burned. I felt a persistent exhaustion brought on by the act of pushing my body through the days. My knees ached, my back ached, my fingers stank, my friends all annoyed me. I had no desire to grow older; I was already old enough.
I had started work on a dandelion chain when Nathan Duffy’s dented old VW pulled up to the house. The passenger door opened with a rattle, and out tumbled Caroline in a short flowery dress, her waist-length dirty-blond hair falling like a cape behind her.