You upset this, always lurking in the corner while we finished our plates of cake, waiting for my mother and me to stop singing at the piano so you could dust the piano top. You were constantly watching. Your watching turned us from a family into a performance of one.
Every time I caught myself laughing freely, the next moment there you’d be, clearing our plates, and a newly familiar feeling of shame would wash over me. It was as if you wore the shame of your father’s death as perfume, the scent lingering in our rooms even after you finished the day’s cleaning and retired.
The years passed this way and we exchanged only the sparest remarks. I remember one day we were alone in the house together and I wanted something to eat but you were in the kitchen preparing dinner. I waited until my stomach was wound with hunger but you would not leave, and when I finally resolved to enter the kitchen I gathered our cat into my arms to use as a kind of shield. You were punching a lump of dough on the countertop and singing to yourself. I crept silently behind you. When you turned and saw me you yelped and the cat scrambled around in my arms, drawing blood.
You put down the piece of dough you were molding and held my arm just as carefully. There was a long line of beaded blood across my wrist, and you dabbed at it with the corner of your apron until I pulled away and said not to bother ruining it. At the next dinner I kept glancing at the three dark spots staining the corner of your apron, and for many dinners after that, as the blood would not wash clean.
Four years passed where I didn’t know you but came to know the sounds of you in the room next to mine — the creaking of the floorboards at dawn and the bath you took each evening, the swish of your hand testing the temperature of the water and then later the swish of your long hair whipping back and forth as you rinsed it clean. I could hear you singing and, before bed, if I held my breath, I could hear you whispering what must have been prayers.
Not to mention how beautiful you became over those years would be like lying. I permitted myself to watch you only as a shape in my peripheral vision.
For three weeks I had chill fever, and for three weeks you entered my room and pressed a cool cloth to my forehead and the back of my neck, or dabbed it in water and held it to my cracked lips. The blurred edges of my thoughts seemed to crystallize when you touched me.
It was a Saturday. Mother played the piano and my father read his newspaper, but my brother was fighting in the war instead of watching for birds. Mother continued to play the same lively tunes that she’d always played, her feet pumping the pedals. I was practicing the foxtrot for the upcoming winter dance, and as you came in carrying a tray of tea cookies my mother halted her playing.
“Why don’t you practice with Eva?” she said. “Suppose someone asks her to the dance, well then you both can learn.”
“I couldn’t,” you said, and shook your head, but my mother had already risen from the piano bench and was pushing you toward me saying, “Go on, go on, have a little fun for once, for God’s sake.”
You shook your head, smiling, and the gap between your teeth flashed at me, secret as a wink. I took your hands. Right away mine felt overly warm against your cool, dry palms.
“Come on now,” my mother said, “not like you’re two corpses,” and she grabbed your arms and shook them, “loose, loose, like that, good,” and then she clutched you close and spun you around. “There,” she said, moving me back into place. “I won’t have a daughter of mine not knowing how to properly woo a beau — Eva, you be the man, that’s right, and pull her tight. That will do. Ready?”
We circled and circled the room, stepping on each other’s feet and laughing, while Mother played through her entire ragtime repertoire, and then she switched to a waltz. I had never heard you laugh. You snorted. “Don’t be imbeciles, go on now, dance it nicely,” Mother said. We held on tightly to each other. With your height it was like dancing with a man, and my chin tucked into the long white of your neck as our circles slowed. I was breathing hard from our earlier dancing and my breath warmed against your skin and stirred up the smell of your hair and pressed close like this I could feel how your body fit with mine. My skin burned beneath the layers of my white cotton dress.
“Good work,” Mother said, halting the waltz. Her voice made me flinch. “Time for lunch, what have you cooked up, Eva?” Could she see the way I leaned into you? How my leg fit between yours, keeping the beat? Through lunch I felt as I hoped I would if God chose to reveal his presence to me — a golden tightening behind my sternum that spread throughout my body, warming me like liquor, lighting me from the inside. My father didn’t look up from his paper as we ate but nodded occasionally at my mother, who talked and talked. Your smell — now I’d learned it and when you leaned over me to clear my plate away it lifted me like the first earthy days of spring.
In my dream I realize you have poisoned yourself. I realize because as you get closer there is white froth at your mouth.
From my bedroom window, I can see where your old house used to stand. Now it is a deli and liquor store, where men gather to smoke and hoot.
Were I to find you, and talk to you, what would you remember? Your father, your house, our afternoon of waltzing? Do you remember that before my mother said “good work” and stopped our dancing I had my lips parted against your neck?
You were never my friend. We never walked together in the street with armfuls of books, red cheeked, laughing over boys. I could barely look at you in others’ company, after you snuck into my bedroom, quiet as moonlight, on the night we received word of my brother’s death.
I could not stop my crying. I was so afraid that when I said, “I’m all right,” it was as if I traveled outside my body to watch myself speak. I pulled back the cover and you climbed in beside me. We curled knee to knee. Nothing touched but our kneecaps. I watched the candlelight on your face and you watched me crying and we fell asleep like that, listening to the soft sound of my mother crying in her bedroom down the hall. In the morning you were gone, but you snuck back the next night, and the next, coming closer to me in the bed each time until our warmth made me toss off the blankets, and then your tongue was in my mouth, and what could I do but learn how to dance with it, and when I did the kiss was slower. I felt like I hadn’t been warm since winter started; not layered with Mother’s wool sweaters that ringed my neck with rash, not helping you peel the boiled potatoes, their steam darting around my fingers, but as we moved together I was warm as I’d ever been, slippery against you.
Before my mother died she saw things everywhere: my brother as a little boy crawling across her bedspread, my father in the face of the nurse who bent to tuck her breathing tube back into her nose, and once she looked around the hospital room, awestruck, and stroked her arm as though it were a baby saying “Mary, Mary, Mary,” and when I said, “I’m right here, Mom,” she looked at me as if I’d slapped her.
Another day she opened her eyes wide and said in wonderment, “The woman is trying to save the crane. Its wing is broken, see that? Would you look at the size of that bird.” She leaned forward in the bed, pointing. “What a marvel. Oh! What’s happening now?”
I said, “There’s nothing there.”
I regret that.