“He's sure gotten a lot bigger,” she eventually said.
“Shockingly,” Erica said.
Gayle and Hank exchanged looks.
“Max has been having some trouble at school,” he said. “It's been a little rough around here lately. We keep getting these calls.”
“I keep getting these calls,” Erica said. “Hank doesn't get the calls.”
“Young rebel,” Gayle said. “What's going on, exactly?”
Hank glanced at Erica before answering, but she was still staring at Max in the pool. “There's been some aggressive behavior, I guess? I'm sure it's not a big deal. Happens to lots of kids, I think.”
“Aggressive behavior,” Gayle said. “What kind?”
“Well, one thing, most recently, is that he pulled a teacher's pants down. She was telling him that he had to pull his pants down to go to the bathroom, and he insisted that she do the same thing.”
“Only fair,” Gayle said.
“That's what he said. But she refused, and I guess he just grabbed her waist pretty hard and pulled her pants down, and her underwear came down too, so she was exposed in front of like twenty kids. She wasn't very happy about it.”
Gayle snorted. “I bet not.” She looked up at the blue Texas sky. She was wearing a skirt — she'd come straight from a lunch meeting — and the sunlight hit her shins with a pleasant weight. “The little monster. Must be the Swanger in him.”
“What's that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, come on, Erica.”
“Come on where?” Erica said, opening her eyes wide. The skin beneath them was puffy and dark.
“Well, we had our own issues, I guess, is all I'm saying.”
“We did not.”
“We did too.”
“What kind of issues?” Hank said.
“I guess in today's parlance you'd call it aggressive behavior,” Gayle said. “Kicking, hitting, biting.”
“Biting?”
“That was you,” Erica said, “not me.”
“Well, the biting was.”
“You bit people?” Hank said.
“Just Erica,” Gayle said. “Sank my teeth right into her flesh.” She hesitated for a second, knowing that telling this story would make Erica mad. Although virtually everything Gayle did made Erica mad. All their lives it had been this way, and even more so since their parents had died, leaving the two of them abandoned, undiluted. They'd died within months of each other — both of cancer, as united in illness as they'd been in marriage — shortly after Max was born, and Gayle and Erica had just barely made it through the funerals without arguing. Yet Gayle still called her sister, still wrote and visited, the same as when they were kids and she wouldn't stop going into Erica's room, even when her parents told her to leave well enough alone.
“Why'd you bite her?”
“She had my doll. My Cabbage Patch doll.”
“I remember Cabbage Patch dolls,” Hank said. “Vaguely.”
“She took the doll, and the birth certificate, and everything.”
“You weren't taking care of her,” Erica said. “There was mold growing on her back.”
“That was because of the air-conditioning unit,” Gayle said. “Not my fault.”
“A responsible parent would've noticed.”
“I was like eight,” Gayle said. “So anyway, I went into Erica's room and took the doll back. And okay, I took some of her stuff, too. Her My Little Ponies and Strawberry Shortcakes.”
“She took all my toys,” Erica said.
“It's okay, honey,” Hank said, and put his pale hand on her arm. Gayle wondered what was with all these honeys. Judging by Erica's reaction, or lack of one, it was a completely useless endearment.
“And I arranged them in a, uh, tableau, would you call it, Rica?” she said.
“I wouldn't call it anything.” She turned her entire body toward her husband. “It was the most sadistic thing you ever saw in your life. Those poor dolls. Some of them were hanging in little nooses from the bookshelf. And the other ones, Strawberry Shortcake and Raspberry Tart — they were being, you know, molested by the ponies and stuff.”
“Raspberry was a tart,” Gayle said, “and Strawberry wasn't as innocent as she looked, either.”
“You are sick,” Hank said.
“She always has been,” Erica said. “I bet Dino finally figured that out. What happened to Dino, anyway, Gayle? I thought you two were engaged.”
Gayle gazed at her levelly, choosing not to blink, just as she would at accounts who tried to string her along, get free drinks and lunches without ever committing to the deal. “He ordered a child bride from the Philippines instead,” she said, and Hank laughed. “Anyway, so Erica took back all the toys, plus the Cabbage Patch doll and Aerobics Barbie, and set them on fire in the backyard.”
“You did not,” Hank said.
“I was very upset,” Erica said. “You should've seen that tableau.”
“The smell of burning plastic was all down the street. It was intense,” Gayle said. “We had this babysitter who always took naps, and when she woke up the stuff was already melting. She never worked in that neighborhood again, I'll guarantee you. We both got into a lot of trouble, and our parents locked us in our rooms while they tried to figure out what to do with us. I was so mad at Erica for burning my toys. I've never been so mad in my whole life. To this day I don't think I've ever been that mad. Our parents unlocked the doors when we went to sleep that night, and I crept out of bed in my nightie and went into Erica's room and put my teeth on her arm, and I didn't stop until I tasted the blood in my mouth. She screamed like you wouldn't believe.”
“Jesus,” Hank said.
Erica sat rigid in her chair.
The wind blew coolly against Gayle's cheeks, and she realized she was flushed. In her memory she could taste the blood, its unmistakable metallic warmth, this liquid iron at the back of her throat. Over the years she'd tasted her own blood plenty of times — chapped lips, hangnails, paper cuts — but never anyone else's, except Erica's.
“Aerobics Barbie?” Hank said after a while.
“She came with a little radio,” Gayle said.
“You never told me any of this,” he said to Erica.
She reached out her forearm and showed him the scar: a jagged half moon sunk forever into the skin.
“I always thought that was from a shot or something,” he said.
“Nope,” Gayle said. “From me. So anyway, maybe that's where Max gets it from, his Swanger blood.”
The kid had gotten out of the pool and had his pacifier back in his mouth. He had a different toy in his hand now, something in flesh-colored plastic, and he was spinning by the edge of the water to make it fly around his body in circles.
“Will you stop saying that?” Erica said.
“She's only kidding, honey,” Hank said. “Don't take it so seriously, okay?”
“Don't tell me what not to take seriously, honey,” Erica said, standing up. “I've had about enough of you telling me not to take things so seriously.”