raised a fat girl, a slut, and a wacko.”
I snorted through my nose. Now you might think this was insensitive of me, but with Momma you have to either laugh or move to Baghdad to get a little peace.
And if you can’t laugh, then you’ll fall into this black pit infested with horrible thoughts and agonizing aloneness and hopelessness and fear. I should know. I’ve been there.
“And you, Isabelle,” Momma croaked from the bed. “Please don’t make a slut of yourself in Trillium River again. The last time you did, it ruined my reputation as a mother. Ruined it. I was ruined. Ruined. ”
I snorted again. See what I mean about laughing?
“I’ll try, Momma. But I feel some sluttiness overtaking me right now and who knows what your reputation will be like when you get home.”
“I won’t tolerate it, Isabelle,” she wheezed out. “Get out of here, girls. Get out. Out. ”
We needed no further prodding.
We were outta there.
We drove back to Trillium River in silence.
It’s the silence that only simmering sisters can produce together. That rigid, tight, resentful silence that is about as bad as if we started blasting cannonballs at each other’s brains.
Sometimes the silence lasts minutes. Hours. Days. Weeks. It can last years.
Depends on the sisters.
The problem I see with fights between sisters is that the fights can degenerate to scorching meanness so quick, the words cutting right to the marrow, because sisters know how to hurt each other with pinpoint accuracy. They have history and hurts and slights and jealousies and resentment and they don’t know how to rein it in, filter, or how not to be brutally honest with one another.
Sometimes it’s a lovely relationship.
Sometimes it’s a disastrous relationship.
Sometimes it’s both.
Cecilia dropped us off.
None of us said good night.
The silent treatment, I am sure, was engineered and developed by cavewomen fighting with their sisters over who got to spear the mastodon.
The next day we worked at the bakery starting in those wee hours again. It was the weekend, so Cecilia was there, too. She had hired a sitter to spend the night.
The atmosphere was frigid. Like the back of a polar bear’s butt if he’d been sitting on the ice for six years straight. Janie turned on sad classical music and kept looking wistfully at her therapist’s face.
We worked perfectly together, as if we were teenagers again, our steps choreographed, our movements fast but never in the way of anyone else, efficient and quick and good.
We were so good.
Until I heard Janie’s whimper.
Cecilia heard it, too.
Janie went into the freezer and shut the door.
Cecilia and I followed her into the freezer.
“Honey,” Cecilia said, “I’m sorry.”
Janie nodded her head, up and down, like a bobble head. “Me-Me-Me-too. I’m sorry.”
“I love you, Janie.”
“I love-lo-lov-you, too, Cecilia. And Is. Love you, Is.”
We hugged. We were tearful messes, trembling and carrying on with great drama.
Sisters are the worst. And they are the best. A sister can be awful and complicated and loving and protective and petty and competitive, and when you die she is the person you want beside you holding your hand.
Somebody’s gotta organize the potluck after the service and you know your husband’s not gonna be up to the job.
This I know.
I drank my latte with a squirt of Kahlúa in it by the Columbia River the next morning around five o’clock.
The sun was making its usual breathtaking appearance and the sky was golden and clean and soft.
I watched the windsurfer with the purple and red sail glide and fly over the water. It was the same man I’d seen when we drove to the hospital. If I was still a photographer, which I’m not (I ignored that shooting spasm of loss in my gut), I’d snap the shot.
I used to come down to this exact spot with friends and boys during school. I’d had sex in the Columbia River many times, starting in high school.
I hadn’t been a virgin when I arrived. I lost my virginity in a shed with rakes. He was the older brother of an acquaintance. Later he was jailed for raping a hitchhiker. He invited me into a shed and kissed me. That was kind of fun. He was an older boy, a tough guy sort that all naïve girls are attracted to, and he was paying attention to me. Me!
The fun stopped when his hands wandered. I pushed them away, he shoved them back, and shoved me against some fertilizer and told me I’d “like it hard.”
I hadn’t liked it.
It felt as if my body were splitting in half; I could hardly breathe. I was petrified, ashamed, in agony, and trapped because he held my wrists above my head. I struggled; he grabbed my neck and held me down.
“Relax,” he bit out, as he yanked up my skirt, ripped my underwear, and started pumping, my tight body rejecting his, even though he shoved one of my legs to the side to open me up. “Are you frigid or something? A priss?”
I watched his face get redder through a haze of sheer pain, his pumping increasing in speed, his grunting piglike, until his spit sprayed my face one last time and he collapsed over me, his chest heaving. When he could move he squeezed my boobs like you would two sponges, got off, peed in a corner, zipped up, and left. I heard him whistling.
All I remembered seeing was a row of rakes. Rakes for leaves, rakes for gardens, big ones, small ones, tiny ones.
I lost my virginity, through rape, against a sack of fertilizer.
I was almost fourteen. It is a miracle I did not become pregnant.
I didn’t tell Momma about the rake incident because I knew she would blame me. I told Cecilia. She knew something had happened anyhow because her vagina hurt for days and she kept getting in the shower. She felt dirty and thought she smelled.
It was probably the fertilizer. I later dumped the clothes I was wearing, including my bra, which was held together by a safety pin.
Promiscuity followed me after that. Why not? I remembered feeling dirty and damaged, as if I was nothing anyhow. At home there was no dad, no stability, no love, and a momma who sank into a morass of hopelessness on a regular basis. I flirted with boys because I got attention, which I craved. Very unfortunately, I was skinny and sexy, which brought more boys, and amoral men, my way. Things went speeding downhill from there.
I grew to know other girls who were promiscuous in the various towns we’d lived in and we had one thing in common: an absent or abusive father or abuse by other men in our lives.
It was a sad, reckless, damaging commonality to have. We were regarded with disdain, nice boys’ mothers didn’t want us around, and “nice” girls whispered horrible things behind cupped hands and moved away when we came near. We were labeled “sluts,” such a calamitous, hideous burden for a girl to bear.
And yet we were searching, endlessly searching, for the most innocent of all emotions, the purest of feelings, and what the heart longs for above all else: Love.
Only love.
We found rakes instead.
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