When We Were Sisters: a Novel, page 11
Where were you? he asks, his voice calm, but each syllable packed with venom.
My voice dies in my throat. He stands up. So still, it’s eerie. My back presses against the wall.
Were you with a boy? Were you having sex?
His whole body crackles when he’s angry. The electricity sparks off him. The cool calm as his fingers close around my throat, holding it to the door, pushing it into the wood. There’s no wild thrashing about, just the concentration of his skin against my throat, robbing me of breath. My throat leaves my body, zooms out of me like a fly, watching from the wall. Its feet full of death. My sisters yell from the living room. Or maybe they’re right next to me. Oreo darts into our room, afraid. Black spots fill my sight. Aisha’s voice statics the whole apartment. My eyes focus on the part of the stove where the knob of the burner is supposed to be. It somehow got lost, accidentally brushed off by Aisha or me, both of us too lazy to look for it. It’s something we should find, really, so that we don’t have to keep turning the steel nail and hoping the thing lights. Noreen’s on the phone, screaming for help. The sirens come. His hands move off me. I fall to the floor, my knees hit the tile. My eyes in line with his shoes. He looks down at me, his hands slip so easily back into his pockets. He turns and goes to open the door for the police.
Who are they going to believe?
[ ] or [ ]?
[you].
Them: Did he hurt you?
Me: ███
Them: We got a call and we’re just trying to understand what happened. Could you tell us?
Me: █████████████████████████████████████████████████████
Them: Is your Uncle your legal guardian?
Me: ███
Them: Does your Uncle live with you?
Me: ████
Them: Do you have other family?
Me: ███
Them: So, is your sister making this up?
Me: ████
We’re in the same room, but Noreen is so far away I can’t touch her. Uncle ██████ has pulled all of the phone lines out of the walls. Canceled our cellphone plans. The disconnect rings. No one can reach us. We can’t call out.
Why did you lie? she asks and my voice dries.
Desert throat. Sand voice. Fly on the wall.
And then gentler, questioning: Did I make it up? Her eyes furrow. Is it not as bad as it seems?
I look around our apartment. The fridge, full of chicken breasts and grilled vegetables. Soy milk and applesauce. Oreo sits on the couch in a patch of sun.
It’s fine. We’re doing fine, I say, my voice mine and not mine, my voice coming from another me inside myself.
I reach towards Noreen, but she pulls away. Her unfocused eyes stare out the window, which is shoe level with the street. People walk by us. In their own worlds. She’s in her own world, her eyes not the eyes I know but another Noreen’s. She turns her back on me. Her shoulders shrink into herself. We’re all shrinking into ourselves. Practicing how small we can be. If I close my eyes and will it, I can become the air. I can disappear entirely.
There is a me who watches from above, tucked into the corner where the wall meets the ceiling. My skin skies the apartment. I’m there, watching my me below trying to reach Noreen. My me below, full of me-shaped holes. Split. Splitting more with each passing second. All my me’s pour out of my main me. My main me bleeds me’s. My main me too torn to even notice.
You sneak back in okay?
Yes.
I keep thinking about your legs.
Mhmm.
When are we going to the lake again?
I dunno.
I knocked the fuck out. I didn’t do none of my homework, I think Ms. Adams is gonna be mad at me.
I can help you.
I open a can of tuna and spread it out on crackers, dinner the night after the police officers came. Aisha lounges on the couch, her foot on the crook of the window. Oreo sits at my feet, eyes on me, wanting the tuna. Noreen looks at the counter in disgust, blinking slowly.
I hate living like this, Noreen confesses. Aisha doesn’t even stir from where she sits.
It’s not that bad. We’re all fine, I say and Noreen looks up at me, her eyes ice.
(I want to know.)(What you mean.)(When you say.)
(I want you to know.)(What I mean.)(When I say.)
It’s fine. I’m fine. We’re all fine.
A word is a word is a word.
Sister;
Noreen, sitting so far away from me I can’t touch her.
Aisha, in her own world, taking on extra shifts to get us food.
Sister;
A thousand hearts light up the sky.
A thousand different hearts dampen.
Mother;
And here they come, all our mothers
a tower or a warm meal
depending.
The age-old question:
Is an apple always an apple?
Is an apple an apple when someone’s taken a bite out of it?
Is a sister still a sister when a mother dies?
Allah asked us to make language. And so we did. Named all our parts. Named the blue inside us. The heartbreak. The love. Then, we forgot about him. Our language became cement. It settled. Tower. Babel. The fall. The lightning struck. Our throats changed. We separated. We assumed we meant the same thing when we spoke, because we said the same words. But. We were wrong. We were so wrong.
A few nights later, I detangle myself from Aisha’s arms. I slip out past her, so tired that an earthquake wouldn’t disturb her from sleep. My anger blood hot. My anger laces up my shoes, and walks me to the PATH station. I wait in the dead of night for buses to come, for me to make the transfers. It’s just me, my anger, the driver, and the slow blinking lights. My anger carries me across the suburban yards where they live. I’ve only been once, but I remember. When she slammed the door in our faces, his sons watching, the other side of our partition. Their lush house, the garden outside small, but flowered. Watered with my dead father’s money.
My chest is too cold for the spring night around me. He was never yours to begin with, I say to myself, closing my eyes to remember. The way his real family surrounded him at the funeral, us watching from miles away through the TV screen. The way Uncle ██████ never mentions him. How a stranger could take him from us in the middle of the night. I breathe out and feel my body separate from itself. I watch my other self look at me, angry. She has my face, my body, my soft snarl that I’ve adopted from Noreen. Her hair wild, her curls out, where mine is straightened with an iron, pulled back into a ponytail. She is the me who wants justice. The me who wants what could have been mine. The me who wants that man to still be alive so she can show up at his doorstep. The me who would say, you killed my father. The me who would have a knife in her back pocket. An eye for an eye. A life for a life. The me who is standing outside this suburban house. The me who knows the money that’s paying for it. The me who wants to torch their whole house, cut up all their designer clothes. Scorpion sting and venom. Making everything a desert. The me who wants my father back. And if not him, at least his money.
She’s there, watching the house. That me. I need help. I turn my back and leave her there, running when she calls my name, running when she begs me to not leave her behind, running as the fear in her voice rises.
At the doctor’s office, my diagnosis is that I’m hairy. Uncle ██████ made me come here after the night he couldn’t find me. But here I am, not pregnant. Still a virgin. Just hairy. Like Frida Kahlo, the pediatrician says, not turning around to look at me, typing the results into her computer. She was an artist. She had a unibrow. The hairs between my eyebrows sit up, at attention, at the mention of their brethren on someone else’s face. How did this Frida person allow hers to live? To flourish. To be a part of her.
You have too much testosterone. It’s an imbalance. You could try birth control to tame it, she suggests. It has estrogen in it.
If I feed my body estrogen I can become closer to being a woman. The hair on my fingers, the hair trailing up my arms, the hair above my upper lip and my goatee all quake, their demise imminent. I am a body full of hair, a little monster that lurks the hallways of my school. When I walk I feel everyone’s eyes on me, looking at it. I don’t even know if I want to look more like a woman. I just want people to stop staring at me. I try Nair, which smells like plastic burning when I lather it on my skin. But the Nair won’t get rid of all of it, I spread and spread, wipe and wipe, only some of the hair coming off at a time. My legs red, raw, and stinging.
* * *
—
They look like undercooked chicken, Aisha says, not even trying to be mean, just concerned.
Our bathtub is always clogged, when I shower the water pools up to my ankles. When I shave, the water is still there, filled with black curls and soap suds. Aisha yells at me half an hour later when she sees I didn’t clean it and calls me useless. My little hairs cling to the tub for dear life. I pile them up in the center of the tub, the massacre in exchange for two days of smooth. They eventually grow back, thicker, unrelenting, and the process repeats again and again. Aisha’s yell on loop. They’re everywhere, nestled between the corner tiles of the bathroom, somehow littered across the sink. The patch I missed behind my ankle noticeable in the sunlight as I walk from the bus station to school. I try and rid myself of them and they keep finding their way back.
Yes, you are hairy, Uncle ██████ says as I confront him with the enormity of my problem. Both of you are, he adds, his eyes moving from me to Aisha. The two of us fur balls, always fighting. Hairy. Picked over. Rough around the edges. Hard to marry off. He goes to the computer and clicks and clicks, finding a site that sells discount drugs from Mexico. He bulk-orders packs of birth control, off-brand and international.
How can he order drugs across borders? I whisper, but Aisha shakes her head and we both get quiet.
We don’t care how as long as we get them. The rule: Don’t ask questions. You get what you get.
It’ll be enough to last you a year, he beams, getting up from the table, putting his jacket on.
A gold star of parenting suddenly fastened over the hole in his sweater.
Victoria and I haven’t spoken in weeks. She’s mad, saying I’ve forgotten about her, but I don’t know how to say that I’m tired all the time, dragging my body around like a sack. We fight on the phone, the scorpion in me flicks its stinger. You don’t even care about me, you don’t even know what I’m going through. You’re not a fucking friend, I say, knowing damn well how deliberately I’ve tried to hide what I’m going through. Uncle ██████ sits with his back turned towards me, using our computer, clicking away. When I hang up, he asks me to go for a drive with him.
It’s silent in the car. I look out the window until he turns down a road and stops in front of Victoria’s house.
Don’t let the small things become the big things.
Kareena’s long braid swings behind her as she walks. In the morning she sits on the wall outside of school with her friends, her clear backpack boasting Revlon eyeliner, a pink notebook, and her TI-89. The sun peeks through the leaves just to be able to get to her. Every time she laughs the dimples spread across her cheeks. In class, when she’s thinking, her jaw tightens, the veins in her neck move a little, each one carrying her heartbeat through her. But it doesn’t look strained, like the boys in gym when they’re showing off. It looks so delicate, her veins, her breath, everything about her so light she looks like she might not be real at all. When she’s around, I can’t stop looking at her, memorizing her perfectly glossed lips, her cat-eyes winged to the heavens.
When Bobby finds me in the hallway or after school I imagine Kareena’s fingers instead, Kareena’s perfect mouth on mine. And my body morphs, more muscular, I grow taller, my breasts dissolve back into my chest. For this girl, I can be whatever shape she needs me to be, whatever shape makes the veins in her neck go, whatever reminds her that her heart is still beating.
In the morning, Kareena passes me in the hall and doesn’t say anything. But her ghost dimples stay with me all day, her long black braid swinging in my periphery. Every time I turn to look for it, it’s gone, she’s gone, she was never there. But I carry her with me, I carry her into our apartment, I keep her in my pocket, and when Aisha sleeps over at a friend’s house, when I’m sure I’m alone, I take her out and watch her as my fingers come alive.
After school the whole world watches Bobby weaving on the court, shoes squeaking against the wood. The bleachers bow, the net calls his name. He’s perfectly framed: the gymnasium lights kissing his face, finding their way to him. All around him flies careen, all around the world buzzes at his brightness.
I don’t know why he looks at me the way he does. Why after every shot he makes he looks up and smiles at me. Why he finds me after school, his fingers on my skin. When he puts his hands across my body now I don’t flinch, I stay perfectly still, because being his feels better than being alone. When I walk without him, the other girls look me up and down. She’s not even that pretty. And I’m not even a little bit pretty, so it doesn’t feel like an insult.
After the game, he says he’s going to walk me home. All his boys file out of the locker room. I wait for him on the bleachers. The boys say bye to me as they leave. They’re all being so nice. He’s the last one out, he walks over to me. Even a year of him sometimes being around and sometimes not, my knees still have a hard time remembering how to stand when he shows up.
For him, I make myself a girl. Not perfect, but: a girl. I try to picture him walking through our one-bedroom apartment. I try to imagine him sitting on our trundle bed with me. I try to imagine us scouring the fridge together for what we can make into a meal before we curl up on the couch.
It’s okay, you don’t have to walk me.
But his arm is around my waist, pulling me close to him, and my stupid knees can’t hold their ground. All around me the air is made of him, and I can’t get away from it. We’re alone outside the gym and his hand is going up my jacket. His hand is in my waistband, digging into my hip. I flinch on accident, and for a second, I see a flash of confusion cross his eyes. I feel bad. I understand how difficult I am, all my awkward bones, my inability to relax.
But I want to meet your parents.
Sometimes he looks at me like I’m a tender precious thing on the brink of break. He says my heart, and maybe that’s what his hand is, maybe that’s what my hand is when they touch, a pulse that keeps me tethered to the ground. And maybe that’s what his hand is when it slips inside me, maybe it’s just his heart trying to find my heart, trying to touch it.
Tonight, after our walk, we stand in the living room of my tiny apartment, in the middle of my garbage pile. My anxiety is high, Uncle ██████ told us he was going out of town, but I’m afraid he might magically appear out of nowhere. That he has eyes everywhere. That his hand will be around my neck again. But I risk it, to have Bobby in my living room. To have him looking at me the way he is.
So this is why you didn’t want to go home that day.
His eyebrows furrow, he looks towards the window, to the blue Cadillac that I had pointed out to him, ██████’s. This small one-bedroom apartment, that blue Cadillac. He’s trying to do the math. But the math doesn’t make sense. The space between us multiplies, and I know that I’m going to lose his hand in my hand.
* * *
—
But he wraps his arms around me, holding me, both anchor and bench. His eyes on my eyes. Soft. Gentle. Like the day at the bus station. The embarrassment of my world all around, and him: unembarrassed, drinking it in.
Aisha is already in bed, wrestling in her sleep, battling in her silent world. Noreen is there too, she’s been coming home more since the night with the police. They’re separated from me and Bobby by the bit of fabric that hangs. Roaches scurry across the floor, our presence intrudes on their night freedom. We sit on the worn-down couch. His eyes move from the Nilla Wafers package to the mouse trap.
When he’s here, in my world, he’s not the star of the court. His eyes are so soft, like he knows the cost of touching me. Watching him right now, I know what it means to have my heart outside my body, to have my heart in someone else.
I lay down on the couch, and he lays down next to me, my black hair on his chest. He told me his mom won’t care if he doesn’t come home and I wonder what it’s like to have a mom who loves you but lets you belong to the night, who lets you belong to a maybe-girl she’s never met.
Where are they?
I don’t have to ask to know who he wants to know about. My parents of the make-believe, my dad with the name of a king, my mom with her piano fingers.
They’re gone.
I think Allah stopped watching me a long time ago but I’m afraid what else he might take from me if I continue to mess up, if I continue to be a useless fly on his earth, buzzing around my pile of garbage. I don’t want to go to hell. We can move in silence and maybe Allah will look the other way. Allah, forgive me for being janky, I think in my head, Bobby’s eyes on my lips. When his fingers slip inside me this time, on the couch, I don’t unpin from myself. I hear my breath become a different breath, a longer breath, a breath of my skin rather than my lungs. His fingers are outside of me but something larger is pressing in, and my teeth are biting down on his shoulder to stop the pain, to stay in silence, and he’s moving fast, and he buries his face in the couch pillow to stop the sound, and I can feel everything this time, and even though there are so many holes in my body—so many other me’s—my body doesn’t leave my body to watch, my body finally stays.
