Ghosts

 

            Sometimes when my little sister’s got the blues, when Sorrow’s fattest sleeper is camping on her forehead, if the morning’s been unkind, then she’ll go visit my mother’s ghosts in the garage.  My sister has her ups and downs; her downs my mother calls, “spiraling into despair,” a term she uses for her mother and myself as well.  We each have our ups, and we all are known to habitually spiral into the worst kind of despair, the chemical kind where the mind can’t help but collapse in on itself to thwart the body or the soul.  “What separates us from the animals,” my mother has repeated since my sister and I were little girls, “is this,” and she’ll thrust out her thumb, a totem pole.  “We have the ability to change our emotions, sweethearts, we have the need to.  The opposable thumb.  Make yourselves happy.  Who the hell else will?”  When she asks the last question she’ll round her shoulders and turn her head with her eyes cast downward, as if this gets her every time.  The heartbreaking human condition which we can all hardly bear; it gets to my sister hard, and it gets to me, too.  But, we have argued, when the Jews stuffed their parents and children in ovens, when they watched the smoke twist skyward towards its pale cousin, the cloud, could they raise their thumbs to the heavens and decide to be happy?  This idea of the opposable thumb would surely put any therapist out of business.  “I agree, of course,” answers Mother.  “To a certain extent.”

            The only way to get into the garage is with a remote control key, which is kept on the kitchen counter in a ceramic bowl.  It’s easy to tell what emotional state my mother or sister happens to be in.  If my mother’s a mess then her face is.  Each fold in her skin grows redder, her hair falls out of its reddish ponytail in cotton candy wisps; her eyes adopt the chalky glisten that alcohol produces.  “Get your mommy another Bud Light, Alice,” she’ll whisper to my sister from the couch.  “I hurt all over.”  Alice is more discreet.  In fact, if you’re not home when she sneaks into the garage, or if you don’t notice the missing key, you’d hardly suspect she was distressed.  The garage door makes a shriek and then a bang when it closes (when Daddy lived with us the door stayed quiet as a phantom,) and I’ve come to associate the sound of metal on concrete with a kind of sadness you can’t stop.  The stifling sadness of a sibling on the other side of your wall, and you can’t do a goddamn thing to help her. 

 

            The garage is divided into two parts: there are no windows, just one pink, naked bulb that hangs from a green wire in the center of the ceiling.  You pull a chain to turn it on.  To the left is the washer and the dryer (the dryer does a spooky tap dance when it’s used.)  Close by are the endless shelves, and stacks, and columns of mildewed cardboard boxes.  These are filled with the myriad sundry items you’d find in a garage; tawdry costume jewelry, chewed up old clothes, nests for insects; endless water-stained paperbacks and legal documents (marriage papers, divorce papers, birth certificates, expired passports and driver’s licenses.)  We have boxes filled with Christmas decorations, and somewhere in the back, Daddy’s long lost silver menorah; an relic from the Holocaust.  Interspersed among the boxes are spindly, wooden stools, their velvet cushions eviscerated, and yellow stuffing spilling out.  Pale armchairs, that let out exhausted sighs in puffs of dust when you sit on them.  There’s an old chaise lounge in the back with slippery silver fabric, a piece from the 1930’s that Daddy always liked, and that has a nebulous-like blood stain covering it’s lower half that no amount of hydrogen peroxide could remove: the token of my sister’s birth at home.  It’s here my sister goes when despair locks her in its jaw.  This is where the ghosts live.

            There’s one more box, a finely made expensive looking cigar box, that once held finely made expensive looking Cuban cigars, bought before JFK placed an embargo on the goods.  There’s a picture of a dark-skinned woman in a peasant blouse on the front, her ample breasts spilling over its top, a red hibiscus in her hair.  I come from a long line of debutantes and cowgirls, of ranchers, lunatics and, when the term was finally coined, of manic-depressives.  My mother’s family was well-to-do, born into a culture where your last name meant something (something green, that folds,) and although she did not leave the state of California until she was eighteen, buying a box of expensive foreign cigars would have not have been untypical of her father to indulge in.  The sepia stained photographs inside this box are mainly of her family, of Alice’s and my heritage, but they also include her friends and lovers from high school and college. 

            My mother will come into the garage where my sister lies upside down and supine on the chaise lounge, tears streaming steadily down her face to dilute the orange bloodstain on its fabric.  She’ll sit next to my sister and open the box.

            “I guess we’ve got the blues, then.”

            Alice will nod muddily, mucus swamping her head, and making it impossible to breathe.

            “What have we got here?” My mother will select a photograph.  She bursts out laughing, like she does, the kind of unsettling bray that can stop a pulse, or embarrass someone in a crowd (“People are always telling me to be quiet, be quiet,” she’ll say to me in a busy restaurant.  “I won’t goddamn be quiet for you or for anyone else.  If I think something’s funny than the old fucks sitting three booths over are gonna know about it.”)  It takes her almost a minute to recover—she’s crying, too, tears of mirth, but large as those of my sister.  She holds a small, heavy looking black and white photograph cut into a small square with rounded edges.  It shows three girls of similar heights, looking, respectively, about 15, 16, and 17 years old.  They each wear a shin-length pinstriped dress with a white apron (the apron seems to serve style rather than function.)  They have heavily curled hair that fans out from under little white caps.

            “These are your great-grandmother’s children,” she says.  “The blonde one on the left is your great Aunt Betty, see?  This is the shortest her hair ever was; when I was a kid it went down past her ankles.  She had to role it up on top of her head like a spool of thread, and it took her hours to wash it.  But it never curled like this.” She smiles ruefully.  “What a woman goes through to make herself attractive.  She told me once her scalp bled from the metal rollers she slept on.

            “The one in the middle’s Aunt Marge—we named your sister after her, didn’t we?  You probably didn’t even recognize her.  She was a doll, wasn’t she?  She had one great love, Marge.  Was engaged to a kid nineteen years old who died in Normandy during World War II.  She was heartbroken, of course, my mother told me she never loved again.  Oh sure, she fucked around—where do you think your cousins Jim and Joseph came from—but the heart’s a special part of the body, Alice.  I know you know that; it’s funny how it can keep on living, and still never fully heal.

            “And the short one on the end’s my mother—your Gran.  See how she’s looking off a little from the camera?  She did that on purpose, not just in this photograph, but all my life.  She thought her profile was sexier, she said.  Oh Mommy.”  My mother sighs.  “She tried to be a movie star, you know.  She was in some commercials, used to speak on the radio.  Her mother didn’t like her being in Hollywood.  She was the baby of the family, y’know, like you’re the baby of the family.  Your great-grandmother wanted at least one daughter to stay with her.”  Mother will pause a minute like she’s studying the photo, but she’s really listening to hear if Alice has stopped crying.  She has.

“Well, this is them at their first job.  It was a soda fountain in downtown San Jose.  The first day of work your Gran and her two sisters stuck the ‘closed’ sign in the window and spent their six-hour shift eating every type of ice cream the store had to offer.  Needless to say, my dear, their tenure there as servers did not last long.”

 

            My mother knows the details of her family tree with a minute meticulousness.  She can name the cities in California, the ranches that lie along the Consumnes River, Sacramento through Los Angeles, that her family has lived in for the past three generations.  On car trips north she’ll point out cattle and tractors, demanding, lightning quick, we name each one. 

            “Black Angus!” Alice shouts, “Red Heifer!”

            “Caterpillar,” I’ll say of the yellow truck, “John Deere,” and then the three of us will chant in unison, “’Cause nothin’ runs like a deer!” and howl with laughter that accompanies the antique punch line.  When finding a shady place to park my car, my mother, riding shot-gun, will remind me, “It’s the only bit of farmer you have in you, spud.  A need for shade.  But ol’ Alice here was a fine equestrian, wasn’t she?” She refers to the three riding lessons my sister had taken as a little girl.  Alice and I exchange glances in the rear-view mirror.  It’s no secret that my mother finds my relative indifference towards her past (“Not my past, our past.”) disconcerting.  But I find that my own mean blues and chemical spikes of happiness are hazardous enough to bear.  It’s hard to carry the tragedy of three generations of spiraling women on my shoulders, as well.

           

            Mother takes pills for her blues.  When I started driving a year ago, I began picking them up at the psychiatrist’s office once a month for her.  I’ve never met the doctor; he leaves them in a basket on his desk with the other patients’ pills.  Encased in egg-white envelopes, they wait like Easter candy.  She takes one every morning on an empty stomach, swallowing the capsule with a swig of beer.  “My smart pills,” she calls them, and taps on her head with her forefinger.  “Not a big deal—just keeps me sane,” and she’ll smile and finish off her beer.  “No coffee for me,” she always says.  “Why ruin a good buzz?  Ha.”

            She started drinking in the morning when her own mother died.  A cowgirl, an actress, she’d smoked unfiltered Marlboros from the time she was 14, and although it lent a sultry, husky timbre to her voice it wreaked havoc on her lungs (these same lungs, two morbid, black balloons, now float in alcohol at Cedars of Sinai in Los Angeles—a warning for impressionable children and celebrities.)  The cancer moved from her lungs to her brain, and addled the part below her left ear, the part we use to form coherent sentences and words.  For the last six months of her life she spoke in funny, nursery rhyme phrases.  She asked me once, “Maggie, big-girl, get school for ya, honey, deedle-deedle September.  September, New Mexico?”

            She died in the summer.  The wake was held in Sacramento: a summer so hot flies seemed to fall out of the air into merciful piles of death.  My mother had been sleeping with her in her bed in the hospital when she died, and had woken up next to the slack, clownish mouth of a corpse.  There’s a difference between being situationally depressed, and having it hit you chronically, but that summer lingers in my memory as the summer we all sweat tears out our pores, and the oscillating heat waves that distorted the watery faces of the mourners.  I remember Alice, standing shell shocked at the grave after it had been filled in, and the plump pile of dirt that stretched in front of the tombstone.  She was ten years old, and was already fond of repeating my mother’s and grandmother’s childhood stories to her classmates.  How much of Alice died that afternoon I cannot but hypothesize; but it seemed a waste to me.  All of it.  An awful, awful waste.

           

            It was about eight months after her death that Alice first reported to me that Gran was in the garage.  She was eleven at this time, I was thirteen.  I thought that she was merely being sentimental, knowing that she had long outgrown the notion of spirits. 

            “She sits in the Blue Bird, Maggie.  In the passengers seat.” Alice wrinkled her nose.  “She still smokes Marlboros, but she wouldn’t stop even when I told her not to.”  The Blue Bird is my grandmother’s old Mercedes that we inherited post-mortum.  It smells like cigarettes and Opium perfume.

            “Well, has she got her glamour glasses on?”  It was early morning and I was cooking eggs over-easy, the way my mother likes them.  This is a particularly time-consuming task for me.

            “No.  A white scarf around her head.  She says she’ll keep it there till her hair grows back.  The Chemo turned her hair all gray and short, Maggie.  How’d it do that?”

            “I’ll explain it to you another time.”  I can never get the delicate yolk to stay intact.

            “She didn’t say much,” my sister explained, happily.  “I was just looking at pictures and, there she was, in the passenger seat.  She was looking in the vanity mirror for a while.  Later she was poking around in the glove compartment—I think she was looking for her keys.  But I put them under the driver’s seat ages ago anyway.  I’m pretty sure she noticed me.”  By the time I had sprinkled garlic salt over the eggs, and gotten a beer from the fridge, Alice had returned to the garage, and I didn’t consider pursuing her.

 

            Alice was fifteen, I was seventeen, and we were standing on the porch to the front door; the key in my hand was poised above the doorknob.  From inside, the familiar, unsettling bray of my mother’s laugh startled through the glass.  My eyebrows raised, I turned the knob, and Alice followed behind me as I entered the house.  My sister and I never announce our arrival like the kids in sitcoms do—we’ve learned to enter quiet in case Mother has a headache.  On headache days she says even the wind brushing against walls makes her crazy.  Even paper shifting across the floor.  Every tremulous vibration sinks into her head like an ice pick, she says.  This day we opened the door to see her and her friend Karla crouching over the dining room table, their backs to us.  A bottle of Merlot was open on the table; two empty wineglasses stained with purple rings stood next to it.  Alice brushed Mother’s shoulder with her hand.

            “Mommy,” she murmured, and our mother whipped around.

            “Have you said hello to Karla?”
            “Mommy...”

            I saw, lying on the table in the space between my mother and her friend, thin, white trails of powder snaking precariously around the wineglasses.  Karla was holding a plastic soda straw that had been cut in half.  I noticed the overturned orange bottle of my mother’s smart pills.  She was saying something.  My sister’s face seemed covered with snow.

            “…Don’t be an idiot, Alice, they’re just my smart pills, I take them every month.  They’re just crushed up.  It has the same effect, Alice, it’s just a different way of taking them.”

            “Mommy, how many pills did you crush up?”  The powder trails spiraled like lengthy strands of DNA across the table. 

            “Karla was feeling a little low, so she dropped by for a glass of wine.  That son of a bitch her ex-husband’s trying to get her kid six days a week…”

            “How many have you taken, Mom?” Alice started wiping the crushed pills into a pile by the edge of the table with her fingers.  “It’s only the beginning of the month; there’s powder in all the cracks of the wood…” she swept the small white pile into the orange bottle again.  Mother stood up.

            “How dare you, you little shit,” she hissed.  “It’s taken care of.  Nothing is wrong, Alice, do you understand?  It’s goddamn embarrassing that you’re acting like such a little coward.”

            “I’ll just put the powder back into capsules, Mommy.  I’ve seen them sold at that health food place.”  Alice pocketed bottle, and left the room.  I saw her scoop up the remote to the garage as she crossed through the kitchen.  Thirty seconds passed.

            “What are you thinking?”  My mother’s voice was like a finger pointing at my throat.  I followed my sister into the garage.

            At first I couldn’t see where Alice had gone; it took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the light.  My eyes were finally drawn to the Blue Bird, and to my sister sitting in the driver’s seat, her arms crossed above the top of the steering wheel and her head down.  I walked over to her side of the car and tapped on the window.  Raising her head and lying fully back into the seat, she pumped the crank to lower the window.  She stared ahead as if driving, something Mother lets her do on holidays when there’s little traffic in the streets.

            “Gran says she never took a pill in her life that wasn’t aspirin or an anti-acid.”

            “Gran smoked herself to death, Alice.  There’s more than one way to become numb.”

            “Do you think that anodynes are immoral?”

            “Where’d you hear that word?”

            “Gran told me.  Maggie?”  Alice turned her eyeballs toward me, and then turned her shoulders to face me dead on.  “I don’t want you to pick up Mommy’s pills next month.”

            “Alice, what did you do with the pills?”

            “They’re not pills anymore.  Listen, Maggie, I’m serious.  Don’t pick up the prescription for her.  Okay?”

            “Okay.  What did you do with the powder?”

            “I fed it to the Hydrangea.”  I felt my face grow hot.

            “That was a very stupid thing to do.”  The cigar box full of photographs was on the back seat of the car, unopened. 

            “Just don’t pick them up for her.”  Alice pumped her arm, and the window rolled back up, enclosing her in the metal cocoon; the conception place of ghosts. 
 

            The next morning nothing was mentioned about the orange bottle or cut straw.  Before Mother woke up I blew the excess white dust out of the table cracks, and ran the wood down with a soapy sponge.  Mother had been taking the pills since before I was born.  I did not know what this morning would be like without the ritual of popping open the can; the gulp of beer from a coffee cup; the dissolving of the tiny, sugar-coated tablet.

            Mother woke at the regular time.  I had just finished buttering toast for Alice and myself.  She took a piece off of the paper napkin where they were resting and took a bite.  She was in her purple, silk kimono that she wears every morning, and most evenings when she gets home.  She sat on a stool by the dining room table and set the toast down, permitting crumbs to shed along its edges.  I occupied myself by looking for jam in the cabinets, though neither my sister nor I like the taste of jam.

            “It’s your uncle’s birthday today,” my mother said.  “You should call him.”

            “I will,” I said, and wrapped the toast inside a napkin.

            “Remember, there’s a three hour time difference.  You can’t call him too late.”

            “I remember.”  I stuffed the toast inside my school bag.

            “Do you know his number?”

            “I have it in my cell.”  I had every one of their numbers in my cell.  So did Alice.  So did Mother.

            “Where’s Alice?”

            “In the car.”  I turned around, and saw that she was still looking at the toast, her back towards me.  “Don’t worry, Mommy.  We’ll be back right after school.”  She was nodding as I walked out the door.           

 

            April is the month Alice had asked me to forget about the pills.  March had passed slowly— a lengthy swim through clouds and glue.  Mother had become unhinged mid-month.  She had refused to get out of bed for four days in a row, and on the fifth, I had awakened to the sound of Frank Sinatra, and the lemony scent of kitchen cleaner.  My mother was scouring the house as the sun’s bald head barely tipped over the horizon.  After purging the kitchen of insects and grime, of stale cereal and sour milk, after she scraped the black out of the corners of the oven, my mother retired to her room for three more days, with an icy-hot and a Bud-Light.  Alice would go in there often with chicken broth at first, and when that didn’t work she brought saltines and cream cheese, martini olives and V-8 juice.  Emotional food (ice cream, fried beans, tortillas,) my sister excluded.

            April first was the day the prescription would be filled.  I had poked my head into Mother’s room that morning and watched her sleeping form.  The shades to the room were drawn, and the television set was tuned to a dead channel, erratic black and white flashes.  The volume was up enough to hear the quiet hum of static, like the murmuring of angry bees.  The white comforter was on the floor, and her body, wrapped into a knot like an unborn baby, was discernable beneath the sheets, dead center in the bed.  Her torso gently rose and fell, and I had a momentary urge to crawl under the sheets with her, to hold her nervous body to my own as if she were my child, and fall asleep, around her.  When I stepped out of the room I did not turn off the static television, lest she wake up.

            Three more days went by until my mother approached me about the pills.  She was in the kitchen, frying eggs, a container of garlic salt stuck permanently to her left hand.  She was wearing jeans; the first time I’d seen her wearing them for weeks.

            “You haven’t picked up my prescription this month,” she said, shaking salt over her eggs.  I stood behind her and watched over her shoulder as the optimistic faces of the eggs cracked and bubbled in the frying pan.  Any moment she would turn them over, trapping the yolk inside the fried white part. 

            “I just keep forgetting,” I said—a bad lie, but Mother didn’t mention it.

            “Well, Dr. Horowitz called and said the envelope was ready so you can pick them up tomorrow on your way home from school, okay?”

            “Can’t you pick them up?”

            “It’d be easier for me if you just went by after class.”

            “What are you doing that you can’t get them yourself?” I asked.  She slid the two eggs onto a plate, and walked over to the open plastic trash bin next to the sink.  She tilted the plate so that the eggs slipped discreetly into the bin.

            “You’re right,” she said.  “I’ll get them myself.”

* * *

 

            It’s six fifteen and Alice is in the garage.  I’m at the dining room table with bag of granola in front of me, as well as a poem I’m supposed to be completing for English class.  The days have been getting longer, the sky outside remains light only at the horizon’s black edge.  The atmosphere is cool and moist; it hums in the anticipation of a hot season.  Last night our landlord came over to turn off the pilot light to our furnace.  Mother’s been her right self for a week, and by that I mean she swallows one pill every morning, and wears pants during the day.  There have always been periods of despondency in my family, achy weeks of isolation when one of us otherwise noble women withdraws into the swampy, pre-natal places that live inside our minds.  It’s hard to be sad all the time, though, as the women I know can relate, terribly hard, and the most dangerous flirtation to entertain is that of culpability.  Where did the heartache begin?  The constant guilt, the passive-aggressiveness, the bouts of depression, of paranoia, of inexplicable grief?  Did my great-great-grandmother Flannery, starving from the potato famine in Ireland, have a sick temper or nervous tick that her daughter adopted from habit?  Or does it come down to the beautiful way we’re wired: has the delicate, spiraling ladders of DNA in fact determined that my mother wraps herself up in sheets, exactly the way she told me her mother did when she was young? (And of how she would stand beside her mother’s bed for fifteen minutes, trying to detect her delicate breathing, or any subtle manifestation that life still flowed through her.)  Is the angry, bent inflection in my voice decided by the by my genetic chemistry, that in turn echoes my mother’s own, and her mother’s own, and her mother’s own…  Or does Alice sit in the garage in her natal stain and look at spooks because it is a time honored tradition, because it’s what we have been taught to do?

            Alice walks into the kitchen, and deposits the remote in the ceramic bowl.  She says to me, “I was looking at this picture of Mommy when she was like, eleven.  I think it was taken at Tahoe; she’s wearing this little pink bikini with roses on it.  The date on the back says 1964.”

            “Is that the bikini that Uncle Harvey cut up later to wrap up Buster’s paw?”

            “Yeah.  Hell of a band-aid.”  Alice looks over my shoulder briefly, sees that I’m writing “serious” in my notebook, and looks away again.  After a moment she says, “Hey, where’s Mom?  I want to show her something.”

            “She’s been in her bedroom since four.  I think she got housed early tonight.”

            “Don’t be mean, Maggie.”  And Alice walks down the short hallway to our Mother’s room.  I hear the door open and close. 

            Hardly three minutes pass before I hear the door open again, but it is slammed shut this time.  I identify aurally the angry stomp-and-shuffle sound of Alice storming down the hallway.  She comes into view, and my stomach quivers at her face.  Mean as an African death mask, calm and furious as the nose of a Japanese Flying Tiger, her eyebrows are black and drawn, her mouth a hideous line.  Clutched tightly in her hand is the small, orange plastic bottle.  Before grabbing the remote she breaks off the cap with her teeth, and pours its contents into the sink: roughly 200 grams of a slippery, snow-white powder, crushed pills.  She exits through the front door.

            Mother enters the scene next.  “Alice!” she calls.  Her kimono is untied, and she wears men’s boxer shorts with an overlarge Eric Clapton T-shirt underneath.  Her hair sticks out like flimsy wings from the sides of her head.  She leans against the hall with her forearm, and the other hand covers her eyes.  Her face is apple-red, and as shiny.  “Alice, godammit, if you keep running away how the hell can I explain to you?”  My hand is still poised above my notebook, my pencil mad with anticipation.  “Alice,” she yells again.  “Alice, honey, we need to talk.  Lemme jus’… lemme just talk to you for chrissakes…”  She pushes herself off the wall and follows Alice’s path.

            No sooner does she reach the kitchen then I hear the cough and sputter of an old ghost.  Mother stops, and she extends her right arm towards the wall again.  The unmistakable sound of the Blue Bird revving up has a strong effect on both of us.  The pencil falls from my hand.

            We’re out the front door in a flash, Mother following me down the steps of the porch to face the garage.  Night has almost fallen, and the milky slice of the moon is thin and delicate as the tip of a fingernail.  The garage door is open, and the Blue Bird’s headlights are on.  My mother and I both shield our eyes as we step in front of the yellow glare, and I get an eerie feeling like stepping into a cinematic sunshine.

            “Alice cut this out,” yells Mother.  “Stop acting like a baby,” and to me she says loudly, “Did you know she had the keys to this thing?”  She advances towards the car, with her arms slightly extended at her sides, an acrobat.  “Alice come her this instant, and we will talk about this like human beings, for godsakes, if you’d just let me…”

            The Blue Bird growls.  My mother taught us both to drive on a manual transmission (“I learned to drive on a goddamn tractor, you sure as hell can use a stick-shift.)  She continues advancing, and I wonder that the hair on my arms rise when Alice makes the engine roar a second time.  The windshield of the car is inscrutable; I cannot make out even an outline of my sister through the glare.  This frightens me, and suddenly I run towards Mother.  “Mommy,” I call.  “Mommy, come here now, come here now!”           

            I grab her wrist and pull with the full force of my arm, but she falls into me easily as plucking a dry leaf from its stem.  I stumble backwards, landing sharply on the concrete, and Mother’s central weight falls painfully on my ankles, so that her head hits my chest like a clay ball on a drum.  I shut my eyes in pain, but no sooner do we land then I hear the Blue Bird squawk to life in earnest this time (first gear, depress the clutch), the animal squeal of its tires (take it easy, Alice, not so much gas,) and I feel the warmth of a hot-headed machine as it careens past my mother and me, (accelerate, second, accelerate, third; Alice, how fast are you going to go?)  There is a thunderous crash that sounds like a hundred heavy tables breaking, and then, in the aftermath of the crash, the delicate tinkling of glass on pavement.  A hundred, tiny, silvery bells that register profoundly in the crescents of my ears.

            I open my eyes.  The car is wrecked, its hood folded up like a Chinese fan.  My Mother’s head is making a crater on my chest above my heart; it’s heavy with sleep or something like it, but my eyes are seared to the image of the dark and quiet wreck in front of me.  Corkscrews of smoke are twirling delicately upwards to the moon and unfathomable blue.  I negotiate my mother’s body so that she’s gently lying on the pavement, her cheek flattened against the ground.

            Alice has crashed the Blue Bird into a three-foot high brick wall that serves as a barrier between our driveway and that of our neighbors.  The hole now ripped through it resembles a red mouth with pulled teeth.  I cannot remember whether or not the car was built before it was compulsory to install airbags, and I imagine the white balloon exploding in my sister’s face.  The crack of the spinal column.  The collapse of the cranium.  A conspicuous gap in the family tree.  I run.

            Alice is leaning back in the driver’s seat with her seatbelt fastened.  She’s staring through the windshield (the beginnings of thin, spidery cracks have been made in the corners, but aside from that the glass is miraculously intact.)  I wrench open the door and absorb her fantastically uninjured form (her face is bloodless and clean, her thin arms gooseflesh and whole.)  I make an involuntary, high-pitched noise that comes from the back of my throat and through my nose.  Alice looks at me.

            “I can’t get the belt undone, Maggie,” she says.  Her voice, I notice, is also undamaged.  I nod, and reach over her lap to try and tug the seatbelt out of the clasp. 

            “There’s a picture of Mommy in the back seat,” she continues, and her voice sounds like she’s speaking from a coma, or out of a trance.  “Of her with Dad and she’s really fat.  I mean pregnant.  She’s about to have one of us.”  The seat belt does not seem to want to let itself loose. 

            “She’s in one of those awful maternity dresses, with those big flowers pregnant women always want to wear.”  I wrap the seatbelt tightly around my wrist in order to pull harder.

            “Why do pregnant women always wear those flowers?” she asks, her voice still vague, hypnotized.  “Big, ugly flowers to hide their big, ugly stomachs.  She’s not looking at the camera, though.  Someone must’ve taken it without her knowing.”  In the passenger’s seat lays a pack of opened Marlboros, its contents half-gone.  A sporadic trail of ash leads down the front of the seat, and below the glove compartment, I see, rests a mound of cigarette stubs, rings of red lipstick impressed around the yellow ends.  A single cigarette is lit near the top of the pile with its own lipstick ring, and a sickly bloom of smoke escapes from the smoldering tip.

            “It was at the old house in Sacramento.  Mom’s looking off to the side of the picture and Dad's looking at her.  Dad’s smiling really big.  Mommy’s not smiling.”  She stops talking suddenly and looks down at me, as if just aware of my presence on her lap.  “What’s the matter, Maggie?” she asks, because I’m crying, fat tears that roll down my cheeks one at a time.  The belt refuses to budge, and my hand has turned red from its grip around my wrist.  I tug harder, but the safety restraint catches, and I find myself twisted up in the belt, crouching painfully on my knees, half way out of the car.  

            “I can’t get us out,” I gasp.

            “Then that’s okay,” my sister says simply, quietly.  “I love you, Maggie,” she says.  The night is real now.  The darkness cocoons us in balmy atmosphere-- warm for April, strangely moist.  I reach up with my free hand and touch my sister’s face, which makes her smile.  I feel as vulnerable as a baby, and frightened, but I am suddenly struck by the exquisite shape of my sister’s chin—small and definite, just like mine.  It’s a beautiful chin, really, you could cup it in your hand.

(2006)