two

sisters – 8/1952

 

pale, distracted moon, gray as the lobe of a brain, squinting through the

shutters, through the dusty, solemn curtains, leaning across our bedspread

and drooping its light, turning the sheets cold and bloodless as the bellies

of reptiles. i listen to you breathe in the darkness and i can smell your hair

and i watch your stomach rise and fall and the way your eyelids crawl,

reckon, swivel – the frantic reading of dreams, the tealeaves

of the shadows strewn.

 

the mushrooms turn out in their nunneries and the night is warm and

you can hear the crickets and the nightfrogs outside and i wonder how

anyone can get a single minute of shuteye around here, even though i've lived

here my whole life. i think about the pond and the premature frogs

plopping in and the old toads sitting among the reeds and your

waterlillies in their gaunt petals, white and clean and slit

down the back like hospital gowns.

 

it is in these moments, watching you on your back with your hands

utterly still and neatly folded and your breath so shallow, your skin

blue and chipped in the moonlight, like heirloom china, that i realize we have

somehow stumbled into a world of half-remembered dreams and sleeping

princesses and the throb and compression of the previous day becomes

nothing more than a bad, medicinal taste in my mouth.

 

i whisper

in your ear, and your eyes flicker and the house creaks

as if someone is walking across the floorboards, but I know

that it is just the heat from the beams and the clapboards

departing into the night.

 

the nightfrogs carol, the reeds sob, the moon pricks our fingers,

like the sharp edges of an open tincan and we bleed shadows

and seal our sisterhood.

 

–

 

We dressed her in silence. She allowed us to, and didn't move except for a gentle, inadvertent rocking in the loveseat. The morning light filled the lace curtains out like proud chests and we could hear daddy's heavy footsteps pacing in the kitchen. I tied her shoes, her old velvet shoes. I could feel Ava all tense beside me. She was always tense when we were around Penny. She avoided her touch, her eyes, flinched at her sounds. Mama always told me that people like Penny were the purest souls, too good for the sin and conflict characteristic of the rest of mankind. Purer than the first snow in the highest laps and doubts of a mountain top. I guess I could see that. I could see it in the way her eyes lagged to the side, the way her wrists locked and bent, lips red as the broken wax on a love letter, the pale slightness of her skin.

 

She wasn't ever really there.

 

Transported, lonely, obsessed with the smallest things. Like her lilies, down by the pond. Nodding their telepathic heads, sagging like old stockings. Weeding them, trimming them, patting them down, she was normal. For those moments. The lilies were her people. They whispered in her ears. When she wet the bed or broke a vase, Daddy would make her go outside and pull them up, one by one, and then she would start over. These were the lilies that had lived the longest, coming out, white and untouched, like debutantes.

 

I finished with her shoes. Ava finished buttoning down her dress and then stepped away and I gave Penny her an old picture book.

 

I looked sideways at Ava.

 

Did you go out again last night?

 

Ava smiled a little. Yeah, she said.

 

To the reservoir?

 

Yeah.

 

He'll kill you when he finds out.

 

He won't.

 

It'll be kind of lonely.

 

He won't find out.

 

He always finds out.

 

She looked away.

 

I guess you're right, she said. The b*****d's a bloodhound.

 

I picked up Penny's old underclothes and stuffed them under my arms.

 

But you're going out again tonight, aren't you?

 

Yeah, she said.

 

I nod and look away.