The Almost Archer Sisters Read online

  The dawn finally stirred Jake awake. He jumped up to tug on my pajamas like a teething lion cub.

  “Mom, we have to go home now,” he said, knuckling the sleep from his eyes.

  Why wouldn’t joggers stare? I’d gape too if I saw me sitting in the dark on the edge of the slide, looking as battered as a blow-up doll with a slow leak. I had a wad of balled-up Kleenex shoved in a nostril to stop the blood, and one hand down my eight-year-old’s pants patting around his little penis to see if he’d wet himself again. Jake began circling me in an orbital blur of impatience and confusion. It occurred to me that it was the first time he’d ever seen me smoke.

  “Nasty sagrits!” he said, expelling big fake coughs.

  “That’s right, baby, cigarettes are nasty,” I said, blowing the smoke skyward, watching Sam start to stir in the grass.

  “I wanna go home!” Jake yelped. “Why do we gotta not go home.”

  Watching his adorable anger, I suddenly wished I’d had a camera. If not for Beth, who flew in from New York six times a year to get her hair expertly touched up by Lou and to take me out on the town, I’d probably have no pictures of my boys. At the end of every visit, she’d pose us on the porch of the house in which she also grew up, sometimes on the wooden swing, sometimes on the paint-peeled stairs, sometimes by the mailbox, BEECHER scratched out and replaced by ARCHER, which was scratched out and replaced by CHEZ LOU which had been professionally stenciled beneath LALIBERTÉ FARMS, the name I took when I married Beau.

  Whenever the farmhouse felt like it would collapse under the weight of another new repair or addition, or another argument over how to pay for it, Beau would threaten to move us into town, into one of these bland model homes, on an even blander street. When he entertained these tangents, I’d feign deafness. Though nothing farmy remained about the farm, with 325 acres long sold to put Beth through college, another 80 leased to the bachelor brothers’ organic tomato concern, which now paid for Sam’s treatments in Detroit, I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. I never thought much about how a town becomes a city, but I suppose it had something to do with the evolution of our farm, how its outer acres were quickly sprouting subdivisions, its breeding inhabitants flourishing on the fringes of our remaining 20.

  “For godsakes, smile, Peachy,” Beth would yell over the top of an impossibly small digital contraption, which no doubt cost more than Beau made as a mechanic in a week. “Be hap-hap-happy like me!”

  But there’d be no commemorating this visit. Hours earlier, I had walked in on my husband Beau having sex with Beth from behind, the default position, I suppose, of people who can’t bear to look each other in the eye. Beth screamed, “Peachy!” And for the first time since our Roman Catholic wedding, my entrance inspired Beau and me to invoke the name of our Lord Jesus Christ in unison.

  “Alrighty then,” I gently added, closing the door to the walk-in pantry. It killed me that even at the apex of my family’s apocalypse I was still polite. How I had willed my legs back upstairs to wake the boys in the middle of the night, I’ll never know. But I was grateful that I had Beth’s rented convertible as the draw.

  “Sam, get up. We’re going for a drive in Auntie Beth’s fancy car. Get your brother.”

  “What time is it?” he said, still surrounded by darkness.

  “Time to go.”

  Beth had promised them a ride that morning, not necessarily at four in the morning, but the hour didn’t dampen their enthusiasm. Sam ran downstairs bypassing the kitchen where his aunt and dad were now yelling at each other and furiously dressing. Jake trailed behind him. I grabbed my housecoat from the downstairs bathroom and calmly joined the boys in the carport where Sam was acting like a game-show model highlighting the convertible’s features.

  “Is Dad coming?”

  “Not anymore, Sam.”

  I noticed the keys had been left in the ignition. Beth not only didn’t want children, I thought, she wanted mine dead. An exaggeration, sure, but when people asked her if she wanted kids, her standard reply was that she was too selfish to be a mother. She’d sometimes glance toward me for a contradiction I never offered. Instead, I’d nod away as she’d explain how much travel is involved with her work, how being the host of a popular style show meant being away from home at least a third of the year. She came up with the idea for Clothing for Cavemen while working as a stylist at MTV, a job that seemed to involve a lot of sex and shopping. But after she’d told a famous country singer that his hat made him look like an ass, an executive who fell in love with her frank manner put her on TV. Thus Cavemen was born, a show that involved bossy Beth telling hick boys and blue-collar men how to dress like rock stars, for success—or just plain sex—a skill she had honed as a teen in our small town.

  “Sam, you buckle your brother in, okay?”

  He yanked the strap across Jake’s hip bones.

  “Mum. I have to pee bad,” Jake said.

  “That’s okay, sweetheart,” I said, throwing Beth’s rental into hard reverse. The tires spit a very specific hailstorm of gravel at the back of Beau’s Jeep. “You can pee in the car.”

  OF ALL THE idiot things to wake me. It wasn’t the sound of Beau and Beth wrestling in the pantry. It was forgotten meat. I had made a mental note to pick up steaks on our way back from the hospital. But my mental notes seemed to be written on blackboards left in the rain. I wasn’t new to the twin jobs of stay-at-home mom and full-time housewife, but I had always been lousy at them. I wasn’t a rememberer, a darner, a scrimper, a time saver, a coupon cutter (my sister-in-law, Lucy, kept a little file folio. She alphabetized the damn things!). I didn’t clean as I cooked. I watched too much TV, listened to the radio too heartily, pacing back and forth between the rooms in which they were left blaring: kitchen, living room, kitchen, living room, I paced, trying not to smoke, even though I had quit on our honeymoon eight years earlier, not for Beau, but for Sam who was five months old in my belly and already starting to swing from my bottom ribs. And even though I had the time, I didn’t volunteer to bring complicated platters to potlucks, smug upon my arrival. I was not the woman who said to the marvelers, Oh, it was really nothing, when, in fact, I had given it everything I had. Nothing I’d ever done turned out exactly the way it looked like in the picture. Not my dinners, not my house, not my marriage, not my education, not even the boys.

  We had stopped at the Starlite Variety, now open twenty-four hours to compete with the 7-Eleven and the all-night grocery. I poured myself some stale coffee, bought licorice for the boys and an extra box of Kleenex for me. Sam was still out cold under the decrepit slide, the same one Beth and I played on as children. A lurid smear of my blood started at his wrists and petered out at the tip of his thumb. I felt inside his pants again. Still dry, thank God. I’d grown immune to the mute stares a person would naturally attract when openly molesting a passed-out eight-year-old in a public park. I continued to ignore the morning joggers and dog walkers while I lit another cigarette. This used to be a small town. We used to know everyone. Then came the subdivisions and the monster homes and all these well-dressed strangers with their silver minivans and their skateboarding kids who never played in rivers or built forts like we did when we were kids. Instead, they hung out in menacing clusters in town, outside the doughnut shop or the diner, wherever they sold things kids could afford to buy.

  Usually, I’d usher Sam home so he could seize in familiar surroundings. Peeing his pants was a constant concern with his condition, and now that he was noticing girls, the potential for permanent mortification was becoming difficult to stave off. After his diagnosis, we were given pamphlets on antiseizure medications and an awful helmet, a horrible boxer-looking contraption that made our already odd boy look like an insulated freak. Since he rarely wore the helmet, I added full-time head catcher to my résumé. We were also given pep talks by teachers and neighbors about what an “old soul” Sam was and how his so-called wisdom, his seeming maturity, would pull him through. But I knew Sam’s soul was th
e same age as his body; that he still believed his parents were omnipotent and that bogeymen lived under the bed. He could occupy himself with a stick and some dirt for longer than it takes me to finish with the soaps. He was so supportive of Jake’s imaginary friends you’d think he saw them himself. He was no more an old soul than I was. Yes, he was the quieter of our two boys, but if told a time bomb was embedded in your brain, you’d keep activity to a minimum too. It didn’t mean he was thinking deeper thoughts than the other kids. In fact, quite the opposite. When asked, “What are you thinking, buddy?” during one of those faraway looks, he’d more likely have said chocolate cake or kittens than anything rueful, shocking, or sad.

  After our mother died, people used to whisper these things about Beth and me. They granted us the same lofty wisdoms cultivated by adults transformed by the terrific blows of random tragedy. (“The girls are strong. They’ll survive this. They have old souls.”) But it was Lou who had deepened and aged; Lou’s hair turned white in one year. And now Sam’s condition was something we experienced, we witnessed, we feared, not Sam.

  While Sam stirred in the grass, I tried to engage Jake.

  “Would you look at that sunrise. Beautiful, isn’t it, Jake?”

  “I hate the sun.”

  “Me too.”

  Sam opened and shut his hands, studying the blood on his fist, my blood.

  “Welcome back, buddy,” I said. Convertibles had always infuriated me, how they commit such cheery violence on a driver’s head. The ride had spun his hair into a cotton candy Afro. It reminded me of the way home perms used to make Beth and me look like masculine soccer moms until our hair would finally relax. My dad loved the chemical precision of administering perms, so we had had a lot of them as kids. Beth still flew home for the odd touch-up at Salon Chez Lou, because it cost the same, if not less, she said, to fly home on points and to rent a car at the airport, than for her to get her streaks done at a top Manhattan salon. Also Lou took his time, booking the entire day to do his daughter’s head.

  Chez Lou was parked behind the farmhouse along the river, the silver tube topped by an enormous upside-down sombrero of a satellite dish, the only truly “Ugly American” thing left about a man born in East Texas who still retained a slanty Southern accent even after almost three decades in Canada. Beau and I never intended to shove my father out of the house my mother had been born in, the one Lou fixed and adored. There was plenty of room, and I would have been happy with us all under one roof. But Lou said he had always wanted to drop anchor closer to water, that he had always dreamed of living in a Airstream. He had driven a truck for almost ten years, which had happily prepared him for living in the miniature.

  I pulled the wadded Kleenex out of my nose.

  “Did I hit you?” Sam asked.

  “You did, bud. You socked me clear in the schnozzola. We didn’t see it coming.”

  “Jeez,” he muttered into his lap. I could tell he was thinking that if he could almost break his mother’s nose at eight, eventually he might kill me as his condition overtook a growing body.

  Jake pointed in the general direction of our house out on the highway and stomped a foot, a stunt he picked up from Sam.

  “Why do we gotta not go home?” he whined. “It’s forty-five thousand o’clock. I wanna see Auntie Beth before you guys go to New York. And I want to see Grandpa too, and Dad.”

  “We can’t right now, Jake. I’m mad at your daddy,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Because.”

  “Because why?”

  “Because he did something stupid, that’s why.”

  “Well, tell him to stop it,” Sam said, picking grass off his T-shirt.

  “Too late.”

  “Then tell him to say sorry for it,” said Jake.

  “Too late, too.”

  “Are you going to get a divorce? Annalisa’s parents are,” Sam said, perking up. We all knew that, and though I was sad for the Morrows, more so for their three kids, without their epic arguments, to whom would the rest of the town’s couples compare themselves? When things between Beau and me would get a little sour, I too thought, At least we are not like the Sorrowful Morrows, at least we don’t make a public display, at least Beau’s not drunk at the tavern like Scott, at least I didn’t put on sixty pounds after the kids like Jean did, so no wonder Scott messes around with Trina Leblanc, because Jean had just let herself go. I said these things, out loud, to other assholes in town, and now perhaps I was paying for it.

  “We’re not getting a divorce,” I said. “I just need a time-out from Daddy.”

  “Are you going to get another husband? Annalisa’s mom said she’s going to,” Sam said.

  “How’s your head feel?”

  “Okay.”

  “What’s going on in your ears.”

  “A little ringy.”

  “Lemme feel your fingers.”

  He handed me his hands. They were cold.

  AFTER THE DIAGNOSIS, the last remaining plans for Beau to finish renovating the farmhouse, or for me to finish my degree, or for the both of us to do any of the things young couples were supposed to do when their kids were old enough to be left with relatives, were completely scrapped. Life was all Sam: Sam’s symptoms before a spell; Sam’s diet and whether what I fed him had a positive or negative effect; Sam’s sleep patterns; Sam’s stools. I’d pull him to me, almost ardently, in order to smell his skin. Metallic? Putty? Grassy? Fishy? It was hard to think of anything but his ceaseless metabolism; how often he peed and pooed, the color and consistency of both, his stomach size, weight, height, his bruises and how long they took to heal; how dirty he was, or how smelly were his feet.

  Jake, however, I began to handle as though he was formed from rubber, shoving him down into tubs, unraveling his limbs from bikes, wrapping forks around his filthy fists, lifting, dragging, and dropping him, tugging his shirt over his nose too hard, tying his shoes too tight, all the while watching Sam walk, saunter, canter, run, scanning his movements for flaws, for tilts, for clues to impending spells, clearing his path before certain accidents. Admittedly, around the time Sam started to faint and seize with daily ferocity, the part of my brain that had previously stored Big Plans for the Future, was suddenly flooded by relentless thoughts of adultery—just thoughts. Though it was miraculous how just thinking about sex with another man could take my mind off the tests and CAT scans doctors administered to Sam after they told us his epilepsy would get worse before he was old enough for an operation that might make him better.

  “That’s so fucked,” Beau aptly responded, grabbing Dr. Best’s chart as though what was written there might make better sense than what he was saying. “So like my kid might get worse before we can have an operation to make him better?”

  “Or he might not get worse,” said Dr. Best. “Or timing could be perfect. The condition could worsen just as he needs the operation. Then again, there’s no guarantee of the efficacy of the operation.”

  “Fuck,” said Beau.

  All the while I’d be imagining that Dr. Best, homely, brown-toothed, British Dr. Best, was falling madly in love with me. Beau would ask if he could use the bathroom, and in his absence, Dr. Best would clench his fist and quietly hammer at his desk, whispering, “Dammit, Peachy, why don’t you leave him and come live with me. I’ll take care of you and the boys. You can all live in my mansion on the lake with that ridiculous heated garage. You can go back to school if you want to. I’ll pay for everything. Beau doesn’t need you, but by God, Peachy, I do. And so do all those sorry people who are dying for you to keep a file on them, to tell them how to live their lives. To be better people. Don’t you see?”

  I, of course, would say no, I couldn’t leave Beau. I could never break the boys’ hearts like that, especially Sam’s. He was devoted to his father. My imaginary career would have to wait. Besides, leaving could worsen Sam’s symptoms, I’d say. And there’s more to marriage than sex and intimacy. It didn’t help that quality time with my
husband was usually spent at the brain clinic where we would watch a nurse finagle the demonstration dummy so roughly it seemed almost sexual. Then my body began to reject Beau, maybe because he constituted half of whatever formed our damaged little boy and my womb was having none of him. Around that time I had become afraid of relaxing, of unraveling nerves fully stiffened with hypervigilance.

  My adulterous thoughts had started out common: soap operas would fuel them, then I’d masturbate in the bathtub. But because Dr. Best was about the only man I saw on a regular basis who was roughly my age, I began conjuring a fantasy lover, someone who would surprise me on a rambling walk through the brush, like a kinder type of rapist might. I’d imagine myself strolling alone (alone being the most impossible part), and this lover would leap out and grab me. Take me far away from our rueful home. Pin me down hard to the ground. I would fight at first. And then I wouldn’t. That’s it. That was the extent of my fantasies. Maybe we’d make weepy eye contact. He might gently unbuckle his belt; take off his pants. Fold his pants. Dammit, fold my pants. I’d watch myself lying still beneath him like that marble-eyed demonstration dummy as he desperately worked to revive me, to fuck me fully alive again. These fantasies seemed stupid, but they were important. An imaginary lover gave me the sense of being beautifully unworthy of my family, even just for a moment. It became a way of breaking free from the people I loved so desperately that leaving them in my mind was my only respite from this exhausting vigilance.