My belly-skin a lizard’s, shrunk to shimmering and scale.
And here — this dimming streak, gray as ash, that marks me thatch to sternum; this line drawn through my navel that darkened as we grew. We grew, we grew.
I would have carried him in me for years.
And yet here in my face is the vessel I burst trying to push him out. Too late by then he had already outgrown me, grown into me, a leggy, dogged stalk of boy left to bolt to seed. He left in my forehead the fine mesh of roots that living things send out, the paths, the swerving abruptions of blood, the friable clump in the floor of a pot, as though I had needed first, to birth him, to tear him from my brain.
I do not try to hide it. I obscure no proof, no possible claim.
I am claimed in the old animal way — the tails of my shirts, my thick brassieres, hair and neck and cupping car: give him air and the spigot is on. All’s well. All the lights green for Reno, his penis a plump blue cone. I roll it in its sheath between my fingers, gap the bleedy pinprick he pisses on me through.
And if he pisses on Sister? She will skrauk like a crow and giggle, wince, and I will be near, watching over, looking out for her as I used to do, as I look out for snow that slides from a roof, and listen — for the strained-rope sound a branch will make before it tears from the head of a tree. Who could trust her?
I am watchful these new days anyway of anything that moves — small dogs, a fat goose, his own father.
And my sister is always moving, even when she means to sit, or we are, one of us, the rest of us since Mother, we are moving her around. Giving her instructions, keeping her out of the way.
She has a way of making her absence felt. You know better — you should not have let her go. But she is bored, nervous, sullen. She grows weary, quickly, of family, needs somebody new to love. She comes to you for a visit and next you know she has disappeared. It is a monsoon, or a blizzard; you have made your nest in the desert, earthquakes coming, or it is the year of the romance of slums. Scarcely matters. She will wander out into anything, take up with anyone, drift off with the nearest miscreant to look at his tattoos.
I am like her in this; I move away. Even an infant finds safety in motion.
I never settled for years long enough for my father to send her to me, to track me down with news. But he is a good tracker: give him time, he finds you, elated some: some twister gouged the riverbanks, floods in Tennessee. The dying bees all summer. All preamble, priming, the news delivered first that you can do nothing about. And then,your sister—calling her not by name, of course, but by title, binding clause. The slippery possessive. Your sister. My daughter. Under what condition does he call her that — her, I think, or me?
It used to be we tracked down a new place for her every few months, every year. Our father’s house, the YMCA — disastrous. Some school near here in Boston that packed her off in a blink to the loony bin. A problem of climate, my father decided. These dreary New England winters. The desert was next, saguaros and sun, the sobriety of a mineral landscape. She burned down her apartment, dropped a lighted cigarette into a heap of dirty laundry. That was Phoenix, and she was pregnant, a condition nobody noticed until she was six months along. Then the family engaged, oh, oh — moved in for the crisis.
We are a family that loves a good crisis. Birth control? I’d have thought that you… None of us had bothered.
Our father found me, enlisted me; it was a time in my life he could find me, when he could call in the troops, as he said. He flew me out to Phoenix first to see if I could persuade her. My father knew of a clinic not far from him, convenient to him, in Atlanta. I was to fly her back over the country to him, to the house we left our boxes in, in the town we had once called home. He had his Triptiks in order. He had his prim new wife. He had mapped out places to show to his wife on the drive to the clinic in Atlanta.
On the flight west I had my soothing, brief heroic moment, or the thought of one, the big idea. Nothing lasts with me. But for a moment I thought I would take her in, be her good big sister — quick, quick, before Daddy comes. Six months. By then a baby is swallowing; it is opening and closing its eyes. It had begun to hear, to know her voice. It must have turned toward the light as mine did, as I felt him face the sun.
Any light, even this gray gloaming, my boy turns his head to see, though he still sees nearly nothing, no distance, mostly only we keepers, mostly only me.
She stays put now, my sister; the grounds are fenced and gated.
Another bellow — raspy and prolonged. I am beginning to know the difference between hunger, say, and fear. I lift him to me. I am dripping milk. His mouth opens quick as a bird’s.
My breasts are stiff, prickly, lumped. He is rooting, and then uprooting me — that’s what it feels like. I feel the tug in the wing of my shoulder and in the ball and socket; he is drawing my ribs together, cinching the narrowing slots; he is dragging silt from my bones.
All’s well. Night soon. Above us, the snow is ticking down. No distance. No lapsed horizon bleeding pink beyond the flattened trees.
Little raccoon, funny monkey. He drinks and drinks and dozes. Yawns, and the trough in his wrinkled palate shows, slender and deep for sucking. A blister fills on his lip again, the skin of his first mouth already shed, the pale strips frayed and loosened.
Our rabbit flickers her car. A squirrel drops out of the gingko tree at the far gray rim of our yard. Everything in its place; a place for everything. A patch of dirt for the sickly elm, a barn for broken china, rake and nail and rusting plow, a crib he will soon grow into.
It is all always too soon for me, the crib in the wings, the coming melt, the year’s slow resurrection. The steadfast family wagon — my sister fetched from the airport — yawing into the drive.
I lay the boy down in his wicker tub and wheel him away from the door, from the surge of cold when it opens and damp and the squalling of crows in the heads of the trees and the plows groaning out on the highway.
Ready? I think. Ready? Because it has already begun.
My sister is out of the car and running at us before George even opens his door, all teeth and arms and flagging hair, a sidelong lurch and stutter. It is motion, the infant’s comfort, mine, which gives her away. When she stops in the doorway and holds out her hands, waiting for me to come to her, nothing seems so wrong. She is pretty, and she has mastered the phony, square-bottomed smile taught in better homes: clean gums, corrected rows of teeth.
I move to her to see what I already know, cannot — would not — keep from seeing: the tremor, the scars, her bitten lip, the puddles of shadow around her eyes.
She stamps the snow from her sandals, standing wobbling in the doorway, the cold still streaming in. She hugs me, knocks against my chest. It always feels to me that her heart runs rough, won’t idle, wants to race and quit; it is worse every time I see her and tells more clearly what is to come. They come mildly even now to me: days I cannot stop shaking. Another family habit — inherited, her tremor, worse with age (what isn’t?) among the women in our tribe.
She keeps holding me so I stand there, stroking her hair, feeling her shudder against me. The first hour or two is an act with us, as with the early weeks of love. Easy enough, early on, to be sweeter than you are, to keep your few good secrets. But give a girl time, weather, meals. Quit closing the shithouse door. Pretty soon, this is me, I am chewing my tongue just to sit in the kitchen and listen to her, to the squalor of her feeding.