Sister
Pete Barton knew that his sister Lucy was coming to Chicago for her paperback book tour; he followed her online. Only in the last few months had he had the house wired for Wi-Fi, and he had bought himself a small laptop computer, and what he most liked watching was what Lucy was up to. He felt a sense of awe that she was who she was: She had left this tiny house, this small town, the poverty they had endured—she’d left it all, and moved to New York City, and she was, in his eyes, famous. When he saw her on his computer, giving speeches to auditoriums that were packed with people, it gave him a quiet thrill. His sister—
Seventeen years it had been since he had seen her; she had not been back since their father died, although she had been to Chicago any number of times since then—she had told him this. But she called him most Sunday nights, and when they spoke he forgot about her being famous and just talked to her, and he listened as well; she’d had a new husband now for a number of years, and he heard about that, and she sometimes spoke of her daughters, but he didn’t care about them so much—he did not know why. But she seemed to understand this, and just spoke of them briefly.
When his telephone rang on Sunday night—a few weeks after he’d learned about her Chicago tour—Lucy said to him, “Petie, I’m coming to Chicago, and then I’m going to rent a car on that Saturday and drive to Amgash to see you.” He was astonished. “Great!” he said. And as soon as they hung up he felt fear.
He had two weeks.
During that time his fear increased, and when he spoke to her on the Sunday in between, and he said, “Really glad you’re coming to see me,” he thought she’d have an excuse and say it wouldn’t work out. Instead she said, “Oh, me too.”
So he set about cleaning the house. He bought some cleaning stuff and put it in a pail of hot water, watching the suds, then he got down on his hands and knees and scrubbed the floor; the grime there amazed him. He scrubbed the kitchen counters, and was amazed by their filth as well. He took down the curtains that hung in front of the blinds and washed them in the old washing machine. In his mind they were blue-gray curtains, but it turned out that they were off-white. He washed them a second time, and they were an even brighter off-white. He cleaned the windows, and noticed that their streaking was on the outside as well, so he went outside and cleaned the windows from there. In the late August sun they seemed to still have streaky swirls when he got done. He thought he might keep the blinds down, which is what he usually did anyway.
But when he stepped through the door—the only door to the house, which opened right into the small living room and the kitchen area to the right—he saw things the way she would see them, and he thought: She will die, this place will depress her so much. He really didn’t know what to do. He drove to the Walmart outside of town and bought a rug, and that made a huge difference. Still, the couch was lumpy and its original yellow flowered upholstery was worn; at points it was threadbare. The kitchen table had a linoleum top, and it was impossible to make it look newer. There was no tablecloth in the house, and he had doubts about buying one. He gave up. But the day before she was to arrive he went into town and got a haircut; usually he cut his own hair. Only when he was driving home did he wonder: Was he supposed to have tipped the man who cut his hair?
That night he woke at three with nightmares he could not remember. He woke again at four, and could not get back to sleep. She had said she’d be there by two in the afternoon. At one o’clock he opened the blinds up, but even though the sky was cloudy the windows still looked streaky, and so he closed the blinds again. Then he sat on the couch and waited.
At twenty minutes past two, Pete heard a car in the pebbly driveway. He peeked through the blind and saw a woman step from a white car. When he heard the knock on the door, he was so anxious he felt his eyesight had been affected. He had expected—he realized this later—that sunlight would flood the house, meaning that the presence of Lucy would shine and shine. But she was shorter than he remembered, and much thinner. And she wore a black jacket that seemed like something a man would wear, and black jeans, and black boots, and her face looked so tired. And old! But her eyes sparkled. “Petie,” she said, and he said, “Lucy.”
She held her arms out, and he gave her a tentative hug; they had never hugged in their family and the gesture was not easy for him. The top of her head reached his chin. He stepped back and said, “I got a haircut,” moving his hand over his head.
“You look wonderful,” Lucy said.
And then, almost, he wished she hadn’t come; it would be too tiring.
“I couldn’t find the road,” Lucy said, and her face showed real surprise. “I mean, I must have driven by it five times, I kept thinking, Where is it? And then finally—God, I’m so stupid—finally I realized the sign’s been taken down, you know, the sign that said ‘Sewing and Alterations.’ ”
“Oh yeah. I took that sign down over a year ago.” Pete added, “I figured it was time.”
“Oh, of course it was, Petie. It’s just my stupid old mind kept waiting to see it—and I— Hello, Pete. Oh my God, hello.” She looked straight into his eyes, and he saw that it was her; he saw his sister.
“I cleaned up for you,” he said.
“Well, thank you.”
Oh, he was nervous.
“Petie, listen to this.” She moved to the couch and sat down with a familiarity that surprised him, as though she had been sitting on that couch for years. He sat slowly in the old armchair in the corner, and watched while she slipped off her black boots, which were more like shoes, he saw now. “Listen to this,” Lucy said. “I saw Abel Blaine. He came to my reading.”
“You saw Abel?” Abel Blaine was their second cousin on their mother’s side; he had come to stay with them a few summers when they were children, along with his younger sister, Dottie. Abel and Dottie had been as poor as they were. “What was he like?” Pete had not thought of Abel for years. “Wow, Lucy, you saw Abel. Where does he live?”
“I’ll tell you, hold on.” Lucy scooted her feet up under her, leaning down to push aside her black shoe-boots. Pete had never seen anything like them. Little zippers went up their backs. “Okay.” Lucy brushed at the front of her black jacket and said, “So, I’m sitting there signing books, and this man—this tall man with nice-looking gray hair—he was standing very patiently, I noticed that, all alone, and when he finally got to me he said, ‘Hi, Lucy,’ and his voice sounded familiar, can you believe that, Pete? After all these years, he sounded like Abel. And I said, ‘Wait,’ and he said, ‘It’s me, Abel,’ and I just jumped up, Petie, and we hugged, oh God did we hug. Abel Blaine!”
Pete felt excited; her excitement made its way right to him.
Lucy said, “He lives right outside of Chicago, in kind of a ritzy neighborhood. He’s been running an air-conditioning outfit for years. I said, ‘Is your wife here?,’ and he said, No, she was sorry she couldn’t make it, but she had some auxiliary meeting or something.”
“I bet she just didn’t want to come,” Pete said.
“Exactly.” Lucy nodded vehemently. “You’re so right, Petie, how did you know that? It was just sort of obvious to me, I mean, it seemed like he was lying, and I don’t think Abel could ever really tell a lie.”
“He married a snob.” Pete sat back. “That’s what Mommy said years ago.”
“Mom told me that too, way back when I was in the hospital and she came to visit me.” Lucy tugged her black jacket closed. “She said that Abel had married the boss’s daughter, that she was a hoity-toity. He was dressed very well, you know, an expensive suit.”
“How could you tell it was expensive?” Pete asked.
“Well, right.” Lucy nodded meaningfully. “Petie, it has taken me years to figure out what clothes are expensive, but— Well, you can just tell after a while, I mean, the suit fit him perfectly and was made from nice cloth. But he was so glad to see me, Petie, oh, you would have died.”
“How’s Dottie?” Pete leaned his elbows onto
his knees, and glancing around briefly he realized that there were no pictures on the walls. He seldom sat in the chair he was sitting in now, and so he must never have noticed. He always sat where Lucy was sitting, facing the door. The walls just hung there, plain and off-white.
“He says Dottie’s good. She owns a bed-and-breakfast outside of Peoria, in Jennisberg. No kids. But Abel has three kids. And two little grandchildren. He seemed very” —Lucy slapped her knee lightly—“very happy about those grandchildren.”
“Oh, Lucy. That’s nice.”
“It was nice. It was just wonderful.” Lucy ran her fingers through her hair, which partly—toward the front—went to her chin and was a pale brown. “Oh, and guess who I saw in Houston? I was signing books, and this woman—I really wouldn’t have recognized her—but it was Carol Darr.”
“Oh, right.” Pete sat back; the bare walls seemed to be darker in the corners. “Yeah, the Darr girl. She moved away. She lives in Houston?”
“Carol was in my class, Petie, and she was so mean, oh, that girl was so mean to me.”
“Lucy, everyone was mean to us.”
For some reason this made them look at each other, and they briefly—almost—laughed.
“Yeah,” said Lucy. “Oh, well.”
“Was she mean to you in Houston?”
“No. That’s what I was going to tell you. She actually seemed shy when she introduced herself. Shy! And so I said, Oh, Carol, how nice to see you. And she waited for me to sign her book—what could I sign for her? So I just wrote ‘Best wishes,’ and then I gave her the book, and she leaned down toward me and said quietly, ‘I’m really proud of you, Lucy.’ And I said, ‘Oh, thank you, Carol.’ I don’t know, Petie, I think she’s grown up and probably feels a little bad. I’m just saying that’s the impression I got.”
“Was she married?” Pete asked.
Lucy held up a finger. “I don’t know,” she said slowly. “No man was with her, but maybe she had one at home.” Lucy looked over at her brother. “Don’t know.” She gave a little shrug. Then she patted the lumpy couch next to her and said, “Petie, tell me everything, please tell me how you are! Here I am, just two minutes inside the house, blab-blab-blabbing about myself.”
“That’s okay. I like hearing it.” And he did. Oh, he was happy.
“Petie, why don’t you get a dog? You always liked animals.” Lucy looked around, as though really looking for the first time. “Have you ever had a dog?”
“No. I’ve thought about it, but when I go to work it would be alone all day and that makes me too sad.”
“Get two dogs,” Lucy said. “Get three.” Then Lucy said, “Pete, tell me more what you mentioned on the phone. You work at a soup kitchen? Tell me more about that.”
“Yeah, okay,” Pete said. “You remember Tommy Guptill?”
Lucy sat up straight, putting her feet on the floor; her socks were two different colors, Pete noticed, one brown and one blue. She said, “The janitor at school. What a nice man he was.”
Pete nodded. “Well, we’re kind of friends now, and I go with him and his wife once a week and work at the soup kitchen in Carlisle.”
Lucy shook her head appreciatively. “That’s a wonderful thing for you to do. Petie, that just makes me really proud of you.”
“Why?” He really couldn’t think why.
“Because not everyone can work in a soup kitchen, and it just makes me proud that you do. How long has there been a soup kitchen in Carlisle?” Lucy plucked something from the leg of her jeans and flicked it into the air.
“A few years now. I don’t know. But I’ve been going for a couple months,” Pete said.
“Is Tommy well? He must be old.” Lucy looked over at Pete.
“He’s old,” Pete said. “But he’s still going strong, and his wife is too. They ask about you sometimes, Lucy. I bet they’d love to see you.” He was surprised by the change of her face; it closed down.
“No,” she said, “but you tell them I said hi.” Then Lucy said, “Look, just so you know, I called Vicky and said I would be here, and she said she was busy today. It’s okay. I get it.”
Pete said, “She told me that too, and I’m kind of mad at her for it, Lucy. I mean, she’s your sister.” Without meaning to, Pete wiped a finger on the wall near him, and dust came off, a dark streak of it.
“Oh, Petie,” said Lucy. “Look at it from her point of view. I leave, I never come back, plus she asks me for money—did you know that? Well, she does, and I always give it to her, she can’t make much working in that nursing home, and you know, her husband was laid off, and she must feel, you know, however she feels. Do you see her? Is she happy? Well, I know she’s not happy, but I mean—is she okay?”
“She’s okay.” Pete wiped the dust streak onto his jeans.
“Okay.” And then Lucy looked straight ahead, as though she was thinking about something hard. After a moment she just shook her head, and looked at Pete again. “Awfully nice to see you,” she said.
“Lucy, I need to ask you something.”
“What?”
He thought he saw alarm cross her face. He said, “Was I supposed to tip the guy who cut my hair? I always cut it myself. But I went in Carlisle to that barbershop, and the guy cut my hair, and whisked that little apron thing off me, and I paid him, and I’ve been worried since. Was I supposed to tip him?”
“Does he own the shop?” Lucy tucked her feet up beneath her again.
“I don’t know.”
“Because if the guy owns the place, you don’t have to tip him, but if he doesn’t own it, you should.” Lucy waved a hand dismissively. “Don’t worry about it. If you go back, tip him a few dollars, but don’t worry about it.”
He loved her for this, for her knowledge of the world and her knowledge of him. She didn’t seem embarrassed that he had asked such a question. Oh, he really was happy! Maybe that was why he didn’t hear the car in the driveway. He heard only the loud knock on the door, and he and Lucy both jumped. He saw her fear; she sat up straight and her face became stern; he felt the fear himself. He put his finger to his lips and leaned over to—very, very carefully—pull back the tiniest part of the blind. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, it’s Vicky.”
The clouds had moved away and the sun was shining down now; the cornfields were spread out beyond. As Pete stood at the open door, he suddenly realized that Vicky was fat. He had known this without knowing it, but now that he saw her standing at the door, he saw that she was really pretty fat. It had to do with how tiny Lucy was, that he saw this now. Vicky wore a flowered shirt and navy blue pants—they must have had an elastic waistband around her big stomach—and she held a red pocketbook; her glasses had slipped partway down her nose. They nodded in greeting, and she stepped past him. Pete stood for another moment gazing out at the cornfields; in the afterimage in his mind, something had looked different about Vicky’s face. When he turned to go back inside, Lucy was standing, but she sat down again, and Pete figured that she had tried to give Vicky a hug and that Vicky would have none of it; this is what he saw in Vicky’s expression.
“What is that?” Vicky said, pointing at the rug.
“Oh, it’s a rug,” Pete said. “I bought it the other day.”
“Doesn’t it look nice?” Lucy asked.
Vicky stepped around it and stood in front of Lucy. “Well, here you are,” she said. “So why don’t you tell me—what in this great wide world has brought you back to Amgash?”
Lucy nodded, as though she understood the question. “We’re old,” Lucy said, looking up at her sister. “And we’re getting older.”
Vicky dropped her pocketbook onto the floor and then sat down on the couch as far away from Lucy as she could. But Vicky was big and she couldn’t get that far away, the couch was not very large. Vicky sat, her almost-all-white hair cut short, with a fringe around it, as though it had been cut with a bowl on her head; she tried to hoist a knee up over the other, but she was too big, and so she sat on the end of the
couch, and to Pete she looked like someone in a wheelchair he had seen in Carlisle when he went to get his hair cut, an older woman, huge, who was sitting in a motorized wheelchair that she drove around.
But then he saw: Vicky had on lipstick.
Across her mouth, curving on her upper lip and across her plump bottom lip, was an orangey-red coating of lipstick. Pete could not remember seeing Vicky wear any lipstick before. When Pete looked at Lucy, he saw that she had no lipstick on, and he felt a tiny shudder go through him, as though his soul had a toothache.
“So, like, we’re going to die soon and you thought you should come say goodbye?” Vicky asked this, looking directly at her sister. “You look dressed for a funeral, by the way.”
Lucy crossed her legs and put her hands, splayed together, over her knee. “I wouldn’t put it that way. That we’re going to die soon, I mean.”
“How would you put it?” asked Vicky.
Lucy’s face seemed to grow pink. She said, “I would put it the way I just put it. That we’re old. And we’re getting older.” She gave a tiny nod. “And I wanted to see you guys.”
“Are you in trouble?” Vicky asked.
“No,” said Lucy.
“Are you sick?”
“No.” Lucy added, “Not that I know of.”
And then there was a silence that went on for a long time. In Pete’s mind the silence became very long. He was used to silence, but this was not a good silence. He moved back to the armchair in the corner and sat down slowly, carefully.