And, as she adjusted the pillows to help Charlie find the best position for his back, she was doubly glad she hadn’t told him about Marie. If she had, they’d be talking about her sister now—all those conversations they’d had to have over the years about Marie and her troublesome behavior and her impulsiveness and willfulness—instead of turning off all the lights together, the great old house slowly darkening. Retreating to the bedroom, the old woven cane bed and the fireplace that smelled like hickory.
It was such a respite from the churn inside her, the hot splotches that came the minute she closed her eyes: images of Marie and that man . . . Marie and her strange little colt body and her neck thick and ringed red, his hands on her shoulders, wringing them red.
Looking over at him, she only wished Charlie weren’t having to treat his body with such care, propped up on pillows, a homemade heating pad packed with rice. She only wished that, in bed that night, she could touch the cool alabaster of Charlie’s muscled back again, like slipping beneath a museum’s velvet rope to lay hands on the smooth marble of a Greek god.
“I’m so happy,” she whispered from across the expanse of the bed, “to be home.”
* * *
*
Sleep came very late, not until she toe-tap-touched her feet five hundred times on the footrest, an old trick, a compulsion from childhood, from those nights in the wagon-wheel bunkbed, her body awake, her brain awake, her body itching.
Every night, bunkbed top to bunkbed bottom, Dara and Marie twitched and fidgeted, stretching the growing pains from their narrow, muscled limbs, their faces pressed against the bedpost, its shellacked wood cool on their cheeks.
The bunkbed had arrived in a kit when they were very little, still sleeping with their mother every night. It was a big jumbly box of pieces, popped into place by their father. Their father who could fix anything, lift anything, barrel-chested and forever hotted up on something, some inner unhappiness, entombed in a house filled with tutus, with dangling tights and nervous females. Back then, whenever he came in to kiss them good night with beery breath or to tell them to turn their goddamn lights off, to stop giggling and go to sleep, he seemed to take up the whole room. When he set a hand on the bunkbed post, you felt like he could lift the whole thing into the air, could tear the bunkbed into kindling, could crush the whole thing with one swoop.
But by the time they were ten or eleven, he no longer came in to kiss them good night, rarely came upstairs at all, and the bunkbed was only theirs, the forever of their childhood. Dara had probed every groove and beetle hole with her fingers. Thousands of nights, she’d lain there, trying to sleep, listening to their mother pacing the hallways, listening to their father’s TV crackling old movies into the night, reciting her French conjugations for tomorrow’s lessons, cracking her toes and doing dégagés.
And everything shared from bunkbed top to bunkbed bottom was sacrosanct, never to be discussed elsewhere.
So many nights, half sleeping, they whispered secrets about their bodies.
About the thing Dara heard an old man at the drugstore call a “gash,” a dirty magazine open in his hands. Look at that gash, he said to the weary cashier, his hands shaking, waving the centerfold in the air, its fleshy center. Great big slit between her legs, looks like murder.
Or that night Marie confided that she had an extra part of her anatomy that no one else had. Something inside, hidden, that she could coax out if she thought a certain way, or imagined that boy who always skateboarded by their house.
Dara didn’t believe her and explained the things she’d figured out, touching herself down there, dreaming about Harry Perez, the only boy in her ballet class, and how he’d lifted her over his head, his fingers finding things he hadn’t known to find, her leotard soaked through at the crotch by class’s end.
But I have something no one else has, Marie insisted.
We all have it, Dara kept saying, but Marie wouldn’t stop.
I’m touching it now, she said. And Dara kept making faces even though Marie couldn’t see.
Dara even threatened to sneak down to their father’s TV room and bring back the Encyclopaedia Britannica and show her a picture of what it looked like down there, pink and accordioned like the most elaborate tutu in the world.
But Marie insisted that she was different and she said if Dara didn’t believe her she could come up and see for herself.
Marie never stopped insisting and Dara was never really sure.
BREATHE
The old floor was coming up; it was coming up, tooth by tooth. That’s what it reminded Dara of, like their childhood dentist and his tangly forceps. Their father always told them they were lucky they didn’t face the squeaky pliers he’d endured as a boy.