Sixteen Page 5

  The other kids would nod knowingly. “Right, right . . .”

  And as much as I hated being Miranda Milty’s sister, I liked this feeling of respect. I was almost dangerous, by association. And because there is nothing really dangerous about being Emily Milty (or a wool coat, gray soup, or Sears carpeting), it felt good. (Almost as good as stealing a phone right out of the front office!)

  “I’m sure it’s a mistake,” I told Jean with a firm voice. I wanted to add that there was no way my sister even had a dog, because the Miltys aren’t dog people. My mother says so every time the subject of dogs comes up, in public or private. “We Miltys aren’t dog people,” she says solemnly with a kind of uppity tone, a tone that I know well because, like it or not, my mother is a future possibility for me and sometimes I can hear that uppity tone coming out of my own mouth. Maybe I used it right then when I told Jean I was sure it was a mistake. What can I do, though? I am Emily Milty.

  But the truth is that I don’t really know anything about my sister. (Hell, maybe even my dad and Junie run a damn bulldog farm in Pasadena!) I hadn’t seen my sister, in fact, for a year and a half, since our grandmother’s funeral. Miranda had come alone, leaving Marco, a six-month-old at the time, with a friend. (I’d only seen pictures of Marco. Every few months one would appear in an envelope with no return address.) Miranda’s appearance at the funeral was like a miracle, a vision almost. It was so quick and grief-clouded. (My grand-mother was a wonderful woman, and it seemed like another horrible loss in my mother’s life. How many could she take?) I had wondered how Miranda had heard about our grandmother’s death at all, since my mother wasn’t in touch with her, but I’d been too disoriented to ask then and, until this moment with Jean, I’d put it out of my mind. I changed the subject. With girls like Jean, you can change subjects and, pretty easily, throw them off the trail.

  “That homework took so long. Did you finish it?”

  Jean shrugged and looked up at the clock with her pinched eyebrows and trudged off.

  I wished Jean hadn’t told me. I was frazzled now. I don’t like being frazzled. How would I make it through biology? I had to be strong for Miss Finch, who depended on me for the limited joy in her life. Maybe it’s a lie, I said to myself. But really, now that Jean had said it, I knew that it was true, that my sister was in town again. I could feel Miranda’s presence, a certain closeness, as if at any moment someone would cough in the hall and I would look up and she would be standing there, shimmering in her body glitter.

  I sat by the bank of crank-out windows that overlooked the parking lot. I had no idea what kind of car my sister would be driving and I had no indication that she would show up here at all, but still the least I could do was keep a lookout, and so I did it.

  During biology, Miss Finch wrote on the board He-man and Domestic Bliss. You see, sometimes Miss Finch knows exactly what to say, what to do. Sometimes she tunes into my needs and she provides answers. (Like God, but the Miltys, who aren’t dog people, are also not God people. Religion is a crutch, my mother says. It’ll make you walk with a limp. To which I sometimes think, What if we’re already limping? Because of life? And we need a crutch?) She told us that certain female animals (“The peacock,” she said. “The walrus . . .”) choose their mates by the first approach, meaning they look for flashy, big, virile males who would be most likely to produce strong offspring. This was the he-man approach.

  I thought of Tommy Eldridge, who was loud and drove a red car. And poor Miranda, I thought, poor Miranda fell for it. (Sometimes I can feel really sorry for Miranda!) See, Miss Finch knows better than to fall for such trickery. (I kind of love Miss Finch.)

  “But other animals,” Miss Finch continued, “blue bills, for example, woo their mates by providing them with gifts of food to prove that they will be good fathers, protecting and nurturing their young.”

  I thought of my mother’s stories of courtship, how my father bought her a leather-bound collection of the works by one of the Brontës, whom she loved, and pear-shaped earrings because they’d picked pears together once on a field trip as children. And then how he’d bought Junie a tennis bracelet (which, by the way, is made of diamonds, I came to find out, not a sweatband of some sort) with money from my parents’ joint checking account.

  I looked out across the class. There was Justin Gunter. My boyfriend. Or, well, at least my mother thinks he is my boyfriend . . . because I’ve told her that he is my boyfriend. But Justin isn’t the flashy type or the wooing type. We kissed once under the mistletoe at a Christmas party at his house. I’d gotten invited because his mother and my mother work in the shoe department of Boscov’s. The Gunters are dog people. They have a Lab named Arlen, a great big-headed, pink-tongued, loud-breathing dog that sniffed my crotch when I walked into the party, as dogs do.

  The kiss had been almost an accident. We bumped into each other under the mistletoe. I accidentally got punch on his white shirt, and some neighbor girl yelled out, “Kiss! Kiss!” She was drunk.

  I told my mother about the kiss, loosely, not the specifics. My mother had smiled shyly, had put up her hand to say, “No more. That’s enough. It’s private,” and then kissed me on the forehead. I thought of Justin Gunter’s kiss right there in Miss Finch’s biology class—the tight press of his lips, the wispy brush of his light mustache. (And I thought of other things, too; that party hadn’t gone perfectly well in the end. Justin made fun of me. And I snuck into his bedroom and shoved one of his sneakers into my faux-designer backpack.)

  “Choose wisely,” Mrs. Finch said. “Choose very wisely or, if in doubt, choose not to. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  And was it my imagination or was Miss Finch staring at me, Emily Milty, third row back on the left? Be like Miss Finch, I thought, be more like Miss Finch. She’s an unlikely role model, I know that, in her cardigans—orange for Halloween, red for Christmas. But Miss Finch has a part to play in life, and you can’t rely on the Justin Gunters or the George Miltys or the Tommy Eldridges of the world. Miss Finch has stuck with her role, and there was much to be said for that.

  My mother never said anything against Tommy Eldridge. She was afraid of him. He never knocked at the door. He’d gun the engine, and Miranda would clomp down the stairs. She’d flip her hand up, the other hand fitting into her tight jean pocket, and say, “I’ll be home late. Don’t wait up.”

  “How late?” my mother would chirp, trying to sound casual.

  Miranda would say, “How would I know? I haven’t even gone out the door yet.”

  My mother would glance at me, her eyes shifty with fear, and I’d give her the big eyes and my shrug.

  I could have learned how to come and go as I please, like Miranda. She’d already oiled the door hinges. But I didn’t. Miranda would strut out the front door, the car’s engine would tear open and they’d roar off, and my mother would start crying.

  And then she would turn her eyes on me, Emily Milty. She would say, “Tell me what you’re learning in school.”

  But what she meant was: Don’t ever leave me. Don’t ever leave me like that.

  In fact, just last week, she’d been sad, when we were eating, just the two of us, at the table in the kitchen with seating for four. Sadness would sometimes just descend, because Miranda was gone and Marco was out there somewhere with her. My mother’s grandson. She’s already lost her husband and her mother. And she said, “How about something from Oklahoma! to brighten things up around here?”

  So I stood up, opened my mouth, and sang my heart out. “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” and “Surrey with the Fringe on Top.” I smiled and sang and rocked on my heels and then slapped my knee. “Oklahoma O.K.”

  How can I explain it? I would stay here forever. I would make up for my father and Miranda. And, in return, she would offer me all of their uneaten portions of love . . . so much love that I could almost choke on it.

  We had a deal.

  I was nervous when I got home from school. I always tell my mother every
thing, a moment-to-moment recap of my day over doughnuts and milk. I thought it would only raise false expectations if I told her about Ed Pencher seeing Miranda at BJ’s buying dog food. I knew that my mother lived on the hope that Miranda would come back (and maybe my father, too). Somewhere deep in her maternal heart, she still expected Miranda to bound through the door. No matter how wonderful I am, no matter how uplifting and simply good, each moment that slipped by without Miranda was a call for disappointment.

  I decided not to say anything about Ed Pencher seeing Miranda. But I certainly couldn’t say that nothing interesting happened, because every detail of my life interests my mother, everything, especially anything I have to say about Justin Gunter. “It’s so nice that you have a little friend of your own,” my mother says.

  The truth is that I’m not so sure that Justin Gunter likes me at all. Miss Finch once told us about Inuit mothers, that they know their children so well that the babies don’t have to wear diapers. The mothers can sense when the baby in the papoose is about to pee, and they then just slip them out to do so.

  After the kiss under the mistletoe and before I stole his sneaker, Justin walked up to me, his teeth stained pink from the spiked punch, his upper lip wet with it, his apple cheeks shiny with sweat, and said, “I always see you with your mother. Don’t you have any friends your own age?”

  “Sure I do!” I get along really well with both of the girls who have lockers on either side of me. Both of them, not to mention Miss Finch.

  “It’s like the Inuit mothers,” he’d said.

  “What?”

  “Does your mother know everything about you? Does she still carry you in a papoose? I saw you two at the movies together. Shouldn’t you get out and live a little? And I don’t just mean here at my stupid Christmas party.”

  “And you’re living large?” I said. “You’re really going buck-wild? Please!”

  I kept this part of the story from my mother. It would have made her knit her brow. She would have said that men were imperfect. She might have even started to cry.

  Sometimes I don’t even like Justin Gunter. He’s a little overweight and sometimes he wears his shirts too tight at the neck and they seem to cut off oxygen to his big red face. He’s sarcastic with everybody, and although they seem to like it, I don’t. It’s confusing. It sends mixed messages. What would my mother think if she knew that Justin Gunter wasn’t my boyfriend? (Was my mother jealous of Miranda? As jealous as I was when she came home those nights after being out late with Tommy Eldridge and told me how in love she was, and where they did it? Hadn’t my mother married George Milty when she was still young and pretty like Miranda? Couldn’t she have lived a little? What does she think about when she’s listening to the car radio and hums along like she does to “Muskrat Love” and “Afternoon Delight”?) What if my mother knew that I was only a coat-soup-carpeting sort of a girl who doesn’t have anything better to do than comfort her grieving mother?

  I walked into the kitchen through the back door, the curtains puffing out and then going slack. My mother was lining up the doughnuts on a tray. I decided to talk about Jean Pencher’s eyebrows again. It couldn’t be overstated.

  “There should be a policy against penciling in your eyebrows,” I declared. “A firm policy.”

  My mother turned then to put the tray on the table, and I could tell that she’d been crying. Her eyes were puffed and red.

  “Emily,” she said, and then she smiled broadly and then the tears welled up and she covered her crinkled mouth. She walked over to me and hugged me around the shoulders. She whispered into my ear, “Miranda is back! She’s back! Our Miranda!”

  Over the next two days, my mother told me all the new things she’d learned about Miranda. Miranda had gotten a job at the veterinary practice on Cleveland Avenue. It was just secretarial, but she was thinking of becoming a vet herself and so she was checking it out from the inside. My mother said “from the inside” as if Miranda were FBI working undercover in the mob. Marco was in day care. He was a great talker. My mother had conversed with him about a tricycle on the phone. Miranda had three dogs, a great Dane and two mutts she’d taken in as strays.

  But I couldn’t process any of it. I would tell myself the old Miranda stories—how much Miranda had loved Tommy Eldridge, and when he decided to take off with the money he’d saved from working at the par-three, he wanted Miranda to come, too, because she was pregnant and he was going to prove everyone wrong and make something of himself and his new family. I remembered Miranda’s long, impassioned speeches about Tommy Eldridge. There was no need for the speeches. My mother wouldn’t stop her, couldn’t. She wanted her to stay with us, to raise the baby at home while attending the community college, and my mother said so, calmly, unconvincingly. It was as if my mother had been pulled from the audience to help out with a scene. (It was called “performance theater” or something like that. My theater teacher had talked about seeing it in New York. It was bad.) Miranda had her suitcase packed, and Tommy was waiting at the intersection. I replayed in my mind how my mother and I followed her to the front yard, the sprinkler ticking around our shoes.

  Miranda said, “Well, this is good-bye, like it or not. I know that I’m the black sheep. I know I never fit in.”

  “That’s not true,” my mother said. “It’s not true.” But her tone rang otherwise. She was desperate. “We love you, Miranda,” she said. And although this was true, it only made the first denials more obvious lies. It seemed to be that my mother loved her despite the fact that she never fit in, or because of it.

  I was desperate, too, though, and this desperation was what I remembered most of all, probably because I’d begun to feel it again every once in a while since Jean Pencher had told me the news. It was a tightening in my throat, as if my muscles were made out of elastic bands, the kind found on nightgown sleeves, and someone had just cinched them. Even out on the front lawn the night Miranda ran off, the sprinkler spraying my bare legs, my shoes soaked down to the socks, I seemed to understand that if Miranda left like this, so angrily, I would spend the rest of my life making up for it, and I would never leave.

  I said, “Go, then, if you’re going to go. Don’t make any more out of it. Don’t be so dramatic! Just go.”

  And I stormed inside, slamming the screen door behind me and running up to my room, where I dipped below the window and watched her run up the street under the streetlight-moons to the car at the intersection, a car that then roared away.

  This is what I thought about, not any of the newfangled facts like Miranda’s coming for dinner! With Marco! No. I refused to try to believe that. I stuck with the past, with the set of roles the past had well established, with what I knew had happened and was dependably true.

  I was upstairs in my room, waiting, all of my stolen objects laid out on the floor, my padlocks and banners and bonnets, the office telephone, and Justin Gunter’s sneaker. If my mother had knocked on the door, I would have told her to wait; I’d have shoved everything under the bed. But she wasn’t going to knock. She was waiting for Miranda and Marco, who were late—not a surprise. My mother was fluttering around downstairs. She’d vacuumed the whole house, rubbed down all the wood with Pledge, and wiped the windows until they squeaked. And now, from my room, I could smell the bubbling meat loaf, the buttered carrots and green beans, the caramel dessert—Miranda’s favorite.

  I was looking at my loot, thinking, No one knows this about me. No one knows that Emily Milty is a thief.

  When the doorbell rang, I arranged everything in the back of my closet, stood up, and looked in the mirror. I’m ordinary. I have nice eyes. My teeth aren’t too big or too small. Neither is my nose. But Miranda gobbled up all of the prettiness. She was first and took more than her share. (Miranda was a thief first. I’m just reclaiming things here and there. I’ve been stolen from myself, you know.) I brushed my hair and walked downstairs.

  Miranda was standing in the hall and Marco was sitting on the floor at her feet
, taking off his shoes. He had dark hair like Tommy and lots of it, though it had been smoothed down with a comb. My mother hugged Miranda carefully and kissed her cheek the way she would our ninety-year-old aunt Sassy.

  Miranda was a little skinnier than she’d been at our grandmother’s funeral, softer. Her hair was a brash blond, still long, but straggly even though it had been brushed. She wore a big necklace with wood cutouts of giraffes and rhinos. And parrot earrings. She was stomping her feet as if they were cold. My mother took her coat to hang up for her. Miranda still spoke loudly. Her mouth was, in fact, bigger than the rest of the family’s, and she spoke using all of it.

  She was saying, “I forgot it gets chilly here. I mean, I expect Delaware to be so much warmer than Michigan and it isn’t much different.” Tommy had had friends in Michigan. It’s where he left her.

  My mother doesn’t ever really leave Delaware. It has a city, farmland, and a small slice of the ocean for vacationing. I was saying inside my head, We’ve never even been to Michigan. We’ve never been invited or even been given a phone number or an address. And again I thought of my grandmother’s funeral: How exactly had Miranda gotten the news?

  My mother said, “Oh, is that right? Is that so?”

  And then Miranda looked up and she gasped a little, startled to see me standing on the stairs. “Emily, you scared me. You’re always sneaking up on people!” This is the type of thing that’s often said of people like me, the Emily Miltys of the world—the wool coats and gray soups and Sears carpetings.

  Miranda had lipstick stuck on one tooth, but she had a perfect nose and her face was still glossy and all-American. I walked down the stairs.

  “I didn’t mean to be sneaking up,” I said. “I was just waiting my turn.” I felt like a grade-schooler. Since when did I say, “Waiting my turn”? I never had to wait my turn anymore. It was always my turn.

  At dinner, Marco sang his ABC’s, and everyone clapped. He slipped under the table and poked at our legs. Each time we were supposed to say, “Ouch!” But I didn’t.