Labrador Read online

  Daddy laughed, a single ha, and patted the top of my head. “I think she’s a piranha, Kathleen.” Then he walked out of the room.

  That summer was a bad one. I’d gotten a Brownie camera for my birthday, and most of the pictures I took showed great masses of brush: the romantic decrepitude of softwood forests. If you looked closely you might be able to make out the small whirring blot that was the bird whose image I was trying to capture.

  Willie, among all those photographs there is one so sad that, no matter how many times I’ve tried, it will not allow me to throw it away. Mama is sitting in her wing chair, her cold profile bent over her knitting. To the right of her, in his matching chair, Daddy sits, glass in hand, staring at her with disbelief and rancor. His notebook is open in his lap. And what about the photographer? What about me? Even the sudden light of the flashbulb has not been able to rouse them from their solitary gnawing. It’s as if I was never there.

  Of course, they took me along at the end of the summer, when they went to pick you up. What else could they do with me? I remember how they tried to turn this occasion into an expedition, trying, I suppose, to duplicate that last happy adventure up Mt. Washington. We made side trips to local museums, where elderly curators showed us displays of dolls with dried apples for heads and replicas of the American flag devised entirely of bugs. We stopped at a diner for apple pie, and the waitress smiled at me out of her wide, friendly face; she had a white hankie tucked into her breast pocket, and she took our orders as if we were the most ordinary family in the world. We were so cautious with each other! It was as if, by avoiding contact, we could actually ensure each other’s happiness.

  The camp was hidden at the end of a dirt road bored through huge shade trees; a long road filled like a subterranean passageway with viscid heat, it was illuminated, from time to time, by a yellowish downpour of sunlight. Once, we saw a glittery cloud of dust on the road ahead of us which, as we drove closer, turned out to be a tan girl in a white bathing suit, her long legs clamped to the sides of a tall white horse. She raised her hand in greeting and the horse shied—that was when the rock flew up and left a tiny, cone-shaped hole in the windshield. “Great,” Daddy said. “Great.”

  Eventually, we found you in the canteen, seated cross-legged on a picnic table, leaning back into the arms of a blond young man—Ernie, was that his name?—whose pink lips were pressed to your ear, whispering or kissing. At first you didn’t notice us. “I bet you would,” you were saying. “I bet you’d like that a lot.” Then you looked up. “Well,” you said, laughing, “look who’s here.”

  “Willie,” Mama said. “Sweetheart.”

  We all stood positioned on the black-and-white squares of linoleum like chess pieces, watching as you gracefully lifted the young man’s hands from your chest and then jumped down from the table, landing softly on the balls of your feet. “Isn’t this nice,” you said. “The whole family: Mr. Noodle, the Mouse Queen, and Little Kitty. They’ve come to take me away from all this,” you said, over your shoulder, to the young man.

  “Hello,” he said. He was trying to be polite; I think I remember you telling me that he came from a wealthy family on the Main Line, that the extravagant red convertible in the parking lot was his. Whatever his hopes were for romance, they were not so strong as his urge to be mannerly in the presence of adults.

  “Have they been taking good care of you, sweetheart?” Mama asked. She walked over to kiss you, but you held up your hands like a traffic cop.

  “Whoa, there,” you said. “Let me refresh your memory. I am Willie Mowbrey, the one kid in this camp who never received so much as a single brownie from her loving mom and dad.” Your lips were painted with bright red lipstick, and it looked as if all the color in your body had gathered there, leaving the rest of you empty and white; an empty white page on which those two lips opened and closed, mysteriously, like a symbol.

  “Honey,” Mama said, but then Daddy nudged her to one side.

  “Perhaps,” he said, “it’s not too late to rectify that situation?” He held out a round tin box, on top of which was printed a picture of Santa and Mrs. Claus. “Some of your mother’s famous sand tarts,” he said. “Just for you.”

  “Oh, well,” you said, taking the box and putting it on the table without looking at it, “that changes everything. Mother’s sand tarts.”

  “Maybe you’d like to offer one to your friend?” Mama suggested. “Would you like a cookie?”

  “Thank you,” the young man said, getting up. He pried the lid off the tin and peered inside. “They look delicious.”

  “She makes them with real sand,” you said.

  “Willie, that’s enough,” Daddy said.

  “When she can’t get real sand, she uses plaster dust. You can hardly tell the difference.” You began to move across the floor in a complicated series of movements—the upper part of your body fluid, as if under water; your legs and feet jittery and rapid, the swiveling eyes of birds.

  “Oh!” Mama said. “Sweetheart, that’s beautiful.”

  “She’s really good,” the young man said, chewing on a cookie. His eyes were vague with lust. “Willie’s the best.”

  “Shut up, Ernie,” you said. Then you looked at me. “Some things should be kept private,” you said.

  The canteen was low-ceilinged and long, with vending machines along the far wall; it smelled like pine needles and cigarette smoke and, because the trees grew so close to the few small-paned windows, it was dark inside, and cool, like the inside of a church. Nothing was happening. You were leaning against the screen door, your hands shoved into the pockets of your blue jeans; your hair was hanging in a single braid over one shoulder, and I thought that your neck looked too fine to bear the weight of all that hair. You were waiting for me to say something, and I knew that, as usual, I was going to disappoint you.

  “We’ve missed you so much,” Mama said.

  “You’re looking good, Willie,” Daddy added. He was wearing one of those short-sleeved shirts that men wear in the summertime, out of which his arms extended, like two sticks, more or less in your direction. A mosquito landed on his wrist and drank some of his blood.

  “The nonsense continues,” you said.

  I was the awkward and dopey version of the younger sister, standing there in the middle of that mean, damp room on my black square; I was a giant wearing glasses. I looked up, feeling the ceiling’s sneaky descent towards the top of my head, and looking down at me was a teacup-shaped light fixture. Heaven, I thought, that’s heaven. Just about the size of a teacup, hovering over my head.

  Suddenly you lunged forward and grabbed my arm. “Kitty,” you said. “Let’s get out of here. Let’s go get my stuff.”

  “Why don’t you let me give you a hand?” Daddy asked.

  You whirled around and, for a minute, I thought you were going to say something terrible to him. I heard you draw your breath, so that all the bad air in that room flew into you, turning your eyes the color of our cellar walls, flat and moist. Then you changed your mind. You smiled a tight, cool, little smile. When you looked so much like a lizard, did the angels still love you? “It’s all right, Dad,” you said. “We can manage. Besides, I want to show Kitty my bunk.” You turned to the young man who stood brushing cookie crumbs from his lips and chin. “I’ll see you later, Ernie,” you said. And I felt your arm link through mine like a loop of fire.

  “They drive me nuts,” you said, once we were outside, walking along a narrow footpath through fir trees. The ground under my feet rebounded with each step, composed, as it was, of years and years of fallen needles. I wondered if this was how you felt, dancing: even the hardwood stage floor, like the skin of a drum, yielded at your toe’s touch, springing you into flight. “How can you stand it?” you asked.

  “Stand what?”

  “Just being with them.” You led me into a small cabin, empty except for six built-in beds, their mattresses thin and stained with suggestive rust-colored faces. In the corner I saw
your bags, packed and ready to go.

  “Is Ernie a dancer?” I asked.

  You laughed and sat down on one of the bunks. “Ernie couldn’t dance if his life depended on it,” you said. “He’s the swimming instructor.” Then you lay down and folded your arms behind your head. “Kitty,” you said, “I don’t want to go home. I don’t think I can take any more of that shit.”

  “Are you in love with Ernie?”

  “It doesn’t have anything to do with Ernie. It’s them. They’re like ghouls. They give me the creeps.”

  “But what about me?” I asked.

  “I’m not talking about you.” You paused and rolled over on your side, staring at me. Gradually the room was falling into darkness, like a bucket being let down a well. Somewhere there was a world filled with electric lights and ticking clocks, but this wasn’t it. “Listen,” you said, “when we were little, things were different. Remember? We were as close as peas in a pod. We told each other everything. And then something happened. I don’t know what it was, but something happened and you stopped loving me.”

  “I can’t remember,” I said. The air blowing in through the window was fresh, as if we were surrounded on all sides by a meadow. I thought I could smell new-cut hay, that sad smell which always made me wish I was a burrowing animal, curled up and safe in a little dark hole.

  “Let me refresh your memory,” you said. “There was that fat-faced doll with red braids. Just like mine. There was a tea set of some kind.” Your eyes were closed but the skin of the lids was so thin I thought that you could still see me.

  “The Saucy Walker doll,” I said. “And the silver tea set!”

  The edges of your lips curved up in a smile. “She was my doll,” you said, “not yours.”

  I didn’t understand, and I felt frightened. Was it possible that your heart had been broken earlier than mine? Your birthday, I wanted to say, what about your birthday? And then I began to remember: I was little—maybe five years old—and I was sitting on the floor playing with your doll. A half hour earlier you’d stood balancing against the back of the sofa, raising first one foot and then the other, so that Daddy could cross-hatch the soles of your new spring shoes—white patent leather with ankle straps—digging into the slippery soles with the key to the Chevrolet. This was so you wouldn’t fall down the stairs. I could see the bones of your ankles through your white scalloped socks, your calves, your beautiful oval knees, and then the skirt of your white piqué dress—a bell to the waist—and your hand fiercely gripping your white straw purse. I couldn’t see your face. You were high above me and then you were gone. I could hear the gravel crunch in the driveway as you and Daddy and Mama went off to visit Nana in the nursing home. I had a cold; I could make Nana die, you’d told me. One single germ and it’d be all over. Mrs. McGuire was in the kitchen presiding over a pot roast, thinking her usual gluey thoughts.

  “I think it was Easter,” I said. “Was it Easter? And then you came back.”

  “Mr. Noodle and the Mouse Queen were fighting,” you said. “Their usual technique. You know, the silent stuff. She was sighing, and he had his hands clenched on the steering wheel. It was something the Mouse Queen said.” You shook your head. “Kitty,” you asked, “have you ever wondered whether Dad plays around?”

  “Daddy?” I thought what I was feeling was my soul, like a white sheet on a wash line being flapped around by the wind. There I was, sitting on the floor, playing with your doll. When I heard footsteps on the porch I looked up, and I saw your face in the window. Your mouth was opening and closing, but I couldn’t hear what you were saying. It was spring; the wind was from the north—it was fists beating at the walls and windows. “You were beating on the window,” I said. “I remember that. And I got up and undid that lock on the door we never used and let you in. You were mad at me because I was playing with your doll.”

  “You pretended you couldn’t hear me, you know that? I just wanted to play with you, Kitty. It was such a little thing, but you just sat there making that dumb doll walk up and down on the rug.”

  “And then you told me how babies get made. I hadn’t even asked, but you had to go and tell me.”

  “I forgot that,” you said. “What did I say?”

  “You said that Daddy put his thing up Mama’s hole. And then a bean came out and wriggled into her belly. You told me it was called fucking.”

  “I did?” You opened your eyes now—they were pale and large, printed with the spoked wheels of your irises. “I spent too much time with Jojo Melnicoff,” you said. “All of his worst stuff rubbed off on me.”

  “You told me that even though the bean was very small, there was enough blood in it to make you, with a little bit left over to make me.”

  “And you believed me?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I always believed you.” But then I remembered an amazing thing: you had been crying! You were sitting there on the floor beside me, and you were crying.

  “You shouldn’t always believe me,” you said.

  “Oh,” I said, “but that was then.” I watched the cabin windows fill up with dark red light, as if the whole world was swimming along within an enormous vein. “I remember,” I said. “You were crying really hard, asking me to let you play. And then you wet your pants. And the puddle spread out and touched my foot. So I got up and went over to the sofa. I sat down and took off my sock.”

  “You were really disgusted, weren’t you?”

  “No,” I said. “I wasn’t disgusted.”

  “Don’t lie, Kitty. I’m not a complete idiot. I can recognize disgust when I see it.”

  “Well, you’re wrong,” I said. It was very dark in the cabin and I could hear the consistent and sexual rhythms of tree frogs and crickets. I wondered where our parents were—if they had found a place to sit down outdoors and if they were, now, discreetly sipping tall drinks, as they did at home, beneath the tall and billowy sails of shade trees. “And then Rogni came in,” I said. “And he held on to you and kissed you.”

  “Rogni?”

  “The angel.”

  You moved your body over so that it was right on the very edge of the mattress. “There were never any angels, Kitty,” you said. “There were lots of other things, but never angels.” A tear jumped from the corner of your eye, from the place where the tiniest of lashes grew. “Besides, that was you. You were the one who kissed me. How could you forget that?”

  “Cut it out, Willie,” I said.

  “Cut it out, Willie,” you mimicked. “You’re doing it again, and you don’t even know it. You’re still disgusted. You’re so goddamn judgmental, Kitty, it drives me nuts.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Outside, I could hear the sound of voices approaching, far off through the trees.

  “Then the Mouse Queen took away my underpants, so she could wash them. And she hung them up to dry on the porch. They were the white kind. That’s important, because when the spider landed on them it really stood out. It made you scream. You could scream louder than anyone. And that was when we made the pact. No more underpants. Never.”

  “I can’t remember,” I said.

  “Well, I can. It was a secret pact. And I kept it. Did you?” Then you unzipped your blue jeans and pulled the two flaps of denim back, so that I could see the pale skin of your belly and the top of a red triangle of hair, pointing downward into shadow. “Did you?” you whispered.

  “No,” I said.

  Maybe now, secure within the future, I’d be able to yell back at you that it’s the secret locked intact within a sister which exudes light, and that that light is like the erotic nimbus all around her body, like St. Elmo’s fire around a church steeple. The secret shines like something holy, which it is not. That’s why I reached out to touch you, Willie. I was reaching out to see if I could touch the secret, when Mama and Daddy walked into the cabin.

  “Kitty!” Daddy said. “What in God’s name is going on here?” He pulled me roughly to him, and his arms and hands were wet. Then I
heard the persistent dripping of water from the eaves, and I realized that it had started to rain. The chain of my spine fit into the hollow groove between the two halves of his rib cage, locking me in place. After all, I was his daughter—night was moving in with its winds and rain, like a coach full of desperate travelers through the woods—and, however impossible his impulse to protect me, I relaxed into the tense bow of his arms.

  Mama handed you a wadded-up piece of tissue, pale blue, drawing it out from under the sleeve of her jersey. She always kept a piece of tissue there. “We ought to be starting back,” she said. “You girls know your father doesn’t like to drive in the rain.”

  “Then why don’t you drive?” you asked. “You know how to drive.”

  “I’m not even going to bother answering that,” Daddy said. He was still holding on to me.

  “I didn’t ask you,” you said. But Mama was preoccupied with trying to figure out how to close the cabin windows; because she lived in a constant symbiotic state with terror, all events took on, for her, equal weight. Your unzipped jeans and the rain, beading now in the rusty meshes of the screens, impelled inward by the hysterical puffing of the wind to splash on the floor—she acknowledged no difference. “For God’s sake, Mom,” you said. “Leave the fucking windows alone.”

  Then Daddy let me drop. At first I thought he was going to hit you. But there were his fingers, long and yellowish, Chinese almost, against the white skin of your belly, fumbling to snap closed your jeans, tugging to pull up the zipper.

  “Ouch!” you yelled. “You’re hurting me!”

  His upper row of teeth, crooked and strange, bit down on his lower lip, as if he was so hungry he had started in on his own body. The order of the natural world realigned itself: the wind’s source was now somewhere deep inside him, and whatever the emotion was that pressed it forth, I knew that I would always be afraid of him from that moment onward.

  “Get up,” he said, when he had finished. He straightened, pushing his glasses back onto the bridge of his nose. “Come on, Constance,” he said. “We’ve got a long drive ahead of us.”