COROLLA

From Woman with Dark Horses (Starcherone, 2004). Appeared originally in American Literary Review.

I was a twelve-year-old girl when my sister Wanda turned twenty-one. That would be our last summer together, but I didn’t know it yet. Times like these, the night slowly descending beyond the dockside, I think I never knew my sister. No one ever knew her. She was a dark horse in the night, the lone bird that broke the V as the flock struggled to hold together.
   In the summers, she and I lived on the coast of North Carolina in a three-story mauve house near the Atlantic Ocean. The rest of the family shared the upper rooms with us. When I wasn’t with her, I was trying to avoid Aunt Joan, our parents, or Wanda’s boyfriend, Dougy. The old folks didn’t bother me much because they didn’t know who I was anymore. They didn’t remember the day or the year, but they knew the wars they had fought like the broken veins on the backs of their hands.
  Now I’m fighting my own veins as they begin to rise, blue and inky under the thinning skin of my legs and arms. Although I am only forty-two years old, my face is growing soft. My lips have fallen slack because I have no one to talk to anymore. I am alone in the summerhouse, and the rooms are empty and clean, vacant for years now.
  I hardly remember how the lower house looked long ago because it was rented to vacationers. But the top stories were shared by my family, and so were the widow’s walk and the sunroom where Wanda spoke of deep-sea divers and wild horses on Cedar Island. They wove through great glittering trails of broken glass on the shores. Sometimes a long, wavering flock flew over our house in the evenings, the shadow of the wings breaking over the roof where we stood, facing the wind.

Aunt Joan talked a lot about Wanda and wore long red dresses with powder-blue, high-heeled sandals, leather laced to her ankles, her white-painted toenails poking out the fronts. She bathed the house in rose cologne, her perfumed hair long and auburn, twisted into a high, precarious knot coiled around her head.
Whenever Aunt Joan loved a man, I knew it because she brought him to the second floor and sat him down on the black leather sofa. She would whisper something slightly obscene, then wait for him to laugh.
While he laughed, she took the pins out of her hair, then let it unravel slowly on its own. I loved the sound of her hair dropping to her hips, a swoop, a brush, and a thud. To this day, even though Joan is seventy years old and living in an asylum now, bald because the nurses shaved her, I try to fashion my hair to resemble hers that summer. I still have her old braid, auburn laced with gray, a gift from the nurses who’d shorn her. Sometimes I weave Joan’s braid into my own, thinking of Wanda.
  “Poor Wanda,” Aunt Joan said that summer long ago, “that girl’s too smart for her own good.”
  “What about her?” I asked, calling Aunt Joan’s bluff when she first started in on Wanda.
  “She learned too much at that fancy university of hers,” Joan said, “and now she looks scared.”
  “She looks all right to me,” I said, lying through my stained teeth. Wanda didn’t look all right. Her hands shook, and I often heard her in the bathroom after meals, vomiting what little food she had eaten.
  “Don’t deny it. Why else would she quit her studies? She’s ashamed as if she brushed past the ghost of Jesus in the night.”
  “Wanda doesn’t believe in God.”
  “But she’s still afraid of Jesus?”
  “I don’t know.”
  “She knows what she didn’t want to know,” Joan said, twirling her hair after dousing it with cheap perfume, “and now she’s got to assimilate that knowledge and become a different person entirely or shrivel up in her room and die.”
  “She’s the same as ever,” I said, mesmerized by Joan’s lovely eyes. “She’ll live a long time yet.”
  “Uhhhhh,” Joan said. “You don’t know what happens to people.”
  Joan had violet eyes, the whites entangled with broken veins. I opened my mouth to argue with her about Wanda but stopped when I saw her eyes lit with tears.
  “Hush,” she whispered, “just hush up now.”
  So I kept quiet, wondering what Joan was really crying about in our charming summerhouse where the men waited for her on the pale balconies, smoking expensive cigarettes, the smoke that would cling to what she wore.
From her bedroom window, I watched the men, the metal lighters glaring in their fumbling hands while Joan rummaged through her twin closets. She glanced over a series of red dresses, satin, lace, and dyed muslin. Even though she was an attractive woman and no one was wearing corsets anymore, Aunt Joan had never given up the corsets her mother taught her to wear when she was a young girl. She tightened her beige corset by tying the straps to the bedposts and leaning down toward the floor, straining and sucking in air until the straps pulled tight as the silvered strings on Dougy’s guitar.
  Her waist was so tiny then, I wondered how she could eat. Her back was so stiff she couldn’t turn all the way around to look at herself in the mirror, but she was beautiful from any angle. Her figure was the perfect hourglass I longed for.
Under her corsets, her ribs were gradually deformed, small as a child’s, turning in on themselves in the years since her girlhood. Even now her nurses say she has trouble breathing. Her stomach muscles won’t constrict on their own strength. Her lungs wither in their small, misshapen cage.
  When I was a young girl, my body was unruly compared to Aunt Joan’s. I still had baby fat around my waist and was waiting for my breasts to grow. In truth, I had no breasts and was terrified that I would never have a woman’s figure. I thought I would always be pudgy around my belly and have a chest as flat as the dock rails and tiny nipples as soft as raisins. I hated my body and thought I had an ugly face. Wanda was beautiful compared to me, and I wanted to look like her. Joan was a miracle of womanhood in my eyes, and I wanted to have power over men like she did.
  But I was mistaken about the power women had over men, just as I was mistaken about the power women had over their own bodies. I was wrong about many things that summer, especially when it came to Joan and Wanda. I knew nothing then.
  I didn’t know anything until I became a woman myself and Joan had grown old. I found out she thought her waist wasn’t ever slight enough for the men’s hands. Joan confessed as much to me at the asylum. She said her goal was to have a waist small enough to be completely encircled by two hands, and she almost obtained it, but not quite. Her hair was never long enough, her eyes never quite so blue.
As far back as I can remember, during my summers with Wanda, it was one man after another for Aunt Joan. Her men were the vacationers who paid to occupy the lower rooms of our house. Joan was always caught on the stairs, rushing between the first and second floors.
  But her summer romances always ended in August when our family returned to the hilly neighborhoods. We were all supposed to go back to our normal lives. Wanda was expected to go back to her psychology classes. Dougy was to return to his failed jazz band and the pitiful Walden courses he taught at the university where Wanda studied. Father was to fall back on his investments, Mother on her charities.
  I was just a girl then. School and Key Club were all I had. I didn’t want the summer to end because I didn’t want to lose Wanda. She would have been the first in our family with a college education. I felt like she was outgrowing me. I feared that she hated Joan’s eccentricities and resented our parents and the old folks for their simple ways.
  One evening while Joan kept the men waiting, she burst into tears. “Wanda’s headed for trouble,” she said. “She’s losing it. I think you know how I know.”
It’s hell for a family to know each other so well, but I don’t know if we ever knew Wanda as well as we thought. Aunt Joan was the one heading for trouble every day of her life. You don’t know what happens to people, I can still hear her say.
During the winters, Aunt Joan spoke to no one. She locked herself in her small blond-brick house on the hills and stocked up with canned peaches, waiting to be snowed in. I wasn’t sure what she was doing in that house until Father, her brother, told me why he never visited her during the storms.
  She had a room of mirrors I had seen many times before without knowing its function. I thought maybe she loved mirrors because she was a beautiful woman and an artist. When I was a child, I thought all great artists painted beautiful women. So I thought Aunt Joan was doubly lucky, being able to paint herself.
When I was older, Father told me she would undress in that room and draw for hours, sketching the horror she saw in the mirrors, what the corsets and diets had done to her body – bent ribs, nipples scarred from cinching, an unbalanced pelvis, pale skin marked by straps and buttons that had pressed too hard into her stomach’s drooping pouch.
  I know what she really looked like under her dresses because when she had to be locked away, I was the one who unpacked her house and disposed of its contents – the easels and sketchbooks, blue paints, inkbottles and charcoal, the crumbing pastels marking my hands.
  I kept the strange sketches of my aunt stripped of her disguises, completely nude, her knowing expression chastised, painfully aware of what she was. I think of how beautiful Aunt Joan was in her heels and dresses, and I can’t get over the drawings, the way she saw herself all that time.
  Maybe the real pity of the situation is that if she had displayed her sketches in galleries rather than her innocent renderings of whales and sunken ships, coral snakes and clown fish swimming through bluish chambers, she might have been taken seriously as an artist. Maybe she would have eventually been known as great, famous enough for her stay in the asylum to increase the market value of her work. Instead, her ocean murals are faded, peeling away like her damaged skin, painted over like her old face, her canvases disposed of in many houses. I alone know the secret of her portraits, the sketches I keep hidden under my bed.
After all this time, Aunt Joan’s misshapen body is slowly replacing my memory of Wanda’s natural beauty. I can’t even remember Wanda’s voice or her smile, although when I close my eyes I can hear Aunt Joan’s weeping and see her collapsed breast, the curve of her twisted spine.

I assumed Wanda was trying to distract me from the truth. Although at the time I had no idea what she was hiding or that one sister could so mistrust another, now I realize I betrayed her.
  The whole summer was a betrayal, but at the time, I thought she was entertaining me because I was the youngest. Mostly, I just sat on the tile beneath her hammock, my back to the air vents. I watched her mouth move as Dougy smoked and Mother looked into Father’s eyes. All along, our aunts and great-aunts, our grandmothers and great-grandmothers knitted blue shawls for warmth in the white winter that awaited us on the hills.
  The silent veterans had scaled the seas of two wars but never spoke of violence again. They didn’t speak to their wives or to one another. They sat on the porch in silence, facing the ocean. There’s no telling what they were thinking, if the face of Hitler ever merged with the face of Jesus behind their eyes or if they ever knew who I was. Maybe they sensed Wanda wouldn’t follow us into that winter.
  My sister had a curious mouth, uneven, twisted, ripe with the color of wine berries. Her expression was serious, her gaze often still. As she looked off in the distance, her face sometimes reminded me of a large statue in a chapel garden I visited as a small child, pale stone burnished by light, etched in shadow, stained in umber mold. I thought the pupils gathered all the darkness like two black stones, until I stood closer and saw the hollow circles catching shadow. I stood on a bench so I could touch the statue’s eyes and was disappointed by their simple design.
  I despise my curiosity, hate needing to know how faces come together, why they change with time. But mostly I hate my desire to relive what happened to my sister, how my family was destroyed as our tiny failures collected into huge sorrow. I don’t delight in old wounds although I trace the scars at night, leaving the house’s doors open for anyone to come inside. I never lock up. I never turn anyone away, not even the drifters who follow the coast to nowhere.
  I confess everything, the way my family disappointed each other, until no one would look me in the eye without a glint of pain, sudden accusations wordless on the hot air. At first, no one knew where the sorrow was coming from, why it descended upon us like the shadow of a great wave darkening across blue water. One thing I’ve never figured out is how to make the sorrow go away without sending a part of myself along with it.
By the time the deepest depression left with Wanda, following her away from the summerhouse, far from our sheltered lives, she left me numb in the wake of her absence. I was never whole without her. When she left, she took the best of me with her, probably never realizing what she had done.

I felt like I was touching a woman made of stone the evening I held Wanda’s wrist near the high open windows of the summerhouse. On the vacant third floor where the guests used to sleep, Wanda wore a thin green nightgown, long and sleeveless with bright yellow patches near her knees. At the windows, she stood in the strangest pose, her palms touching; her fingers laced together, her arms held high, so that her right arm hid her eyes. Her face rested under the crook of her arm, as if she were rubbing sleep from her eyes or shading them from moonlight. She might have been ashamed or cringing against the salty air.
  As much as she liked to talk during the days, she was often silent by evening. She didn’t respond to my hand on her wrist, so I drew away from her. She might have been a cruel stranger disguised as Wanda, an impostor who destroyed my sister then took her place in the summerhouse. But she was probably just Wanda, my sister slowly growing strange, her sandy skin aglow under the soft light of fluted lamps.
  Outside the window, giant dunes rose from blue darkness, the ocean one with the night sky. Lighthouse beacons pierced the distance. That night, like every night, the breeze smelled of dead fish writhing on the sand, their eyes drying on dank air, fins and oily flesh that would smolder in morning sun, shells that rolled out too far, trapping snails on the shore.
There was nothing to see but all that darkness, tiny moths beating themselves to death on the screen, the dull powder their wings left behind. Crickets leaped and flailed below us.
  “What it is?” I asked, tugging at Wanda’s gown.
  “Look,” she said, “on the sand.”
  “I don’t see anything.”
  “There.” She pressed her face against the screen.
  “Where?”
  I squinted until my eyes played tricks on me. I saw aqua lights on glinting waves and sand crabs scattering like roaches scaling moonlit grains. A houseboat drifted sideways. A pack of stray dogs leaped off the dock, rooting through trash barrels, the vacationers’ refuse. Cluttered papers whirled into the water.
  “Those dogs?” I asked, clawing at the screen.
  She turned around to me, her eyes looking sad, unfocused. “You all think I’m crazy,” she said. “You think I’m making this up.”
  Covering her left eye with her hand, she gazed out the window in the direction of the dock pillars, the coarse ropes that tied wooden bridges to the shore.
I don’t know why she was always looking outside when the house was so wonderful inside, the rooms brightly painted by Aunt Joan, lit with shell lamps dyed pink and teal, their bearded fringe beaded, clacking all through the night. Record players turned in every bedroom, weaving old jazz into show tunes, opera and banjo lacing together through the halls. All along the walls, purple and gray murals of marlins rose out of painted water, the Queen Anne’s Revenge rendered in great detail, a hall of blue waves etched along the ceiling, a floor of green tiles sparkling under our feet.
  “This is our house,” I used to say to myself as I walked to my room at night. “This is our house, and I live here with Wanda.”
  Then I didn’t say it anymore.
  “I hate it here,” Wanda said one night, leaning her forehead against the window screen, her expression hidden from me. Our last summer together, she got in the habit of standing like that all night, waiting until first light before descending the curved stairs to her room, stumbling all the way to her bed where Dougy caught her.

Dougy carried the sickness to the heart of my sorrow. I feared I was losing Wanda to him, and he was the last person I ever wanted to lose her to. She was too good for him, and I thought he knew it. He was letting himself rot, and I could smell him in the halls outside of Wanda’s room.
  Almost forty years old by the time he found his place in American literature, Dougy wore a farmer’s denim overalls without a shirt underneath and never bathed. He had a long beard, dark and tangled, matted with spilled wine and specks of putrefied hamburger meat. He was slowly drinking himself to death, but I didn’t know what he was doing that summer. I had never watched anyone die that way before.
  Sometimes his eyes wouldn’t focus and his words wouldn’t make sense. Once I watched him pick a minuscule worm from his chin as if it were nothing, crushing it in the coarse hairs where it writhed. What Wanda ever saw in him I never knew, except for the fact that he used to be her professor and she was three months pregnant with his child. But no one ever spoke of that, at least not to me. Through my bedroom walls late at night, I often heard Mother arguing with Wanda and Dougy about the baby when everyone else was sleeping.
  “Guess I’m just a lover and a fool,” Dougy used to say to Mother, “pretty much a dead ringer for Walt Whitman. At least that’s what people tell me.”
  He worshipped the Transcendentalists and taught classes on Emerson and Thoreau, often weeping as he read passages from Walden to my sister.
I once heard Father say to Mother, “Dougy is a bastard, and I don’t mean he never knew his real father. I mean he has the soul of a bastard and wants to destroy the world.”
  As much as Dougy loved nature and freedom, he never wrote about anything that didn’t lead to hookers imprisoned in dark rooms. His tattered manuscript was a series of sestinas about Venetian whorehouses, French sisters, and drunken Texans.
  He especially liked to make fun of the old folks because, while the veterans smoked cigarettes and drank coffee on the deck, their wives spent their days fighting over tiny details of the past. Dougy could easily confuse them. The women never understood who he really was. They didn’t know why he lived with us in the summerhouse. They had no idea where Dougy came from or why men waited for Aunt Joan on the balconies.
  The old folks couldn’t have accepted that Wanda slept with a man in her room because they remembered her, but only as a child. Sometimes they thought I was Wanda, and that wasn’t really so bad. The worst days were when they forgot their own names.
  Maybe Dougy loved talking to aged women because they didn’t understand his failure. They had lost control of most of their bodily functions long ago, so how could he have been ashamed of anything with them?
  “I love old broads,” he used to say. “They really dig me.”
  But I didn’t think it was funny. All the old folks are dead now. The summerhouse was rightfully their house, but they never understood what was happening inside. They never knew who Dougy was, and they never knew who I was. I only caught them at the end of their lives and saw their worst days when they had no dignity and I had no way of knowing what type of people they once were.
  “Who is this girl?” one of the great-aunts asked every day that summer. But I could never explain to any of them who I really was.

Sometimes I was afraid, imagining Wanda’s face hidden forever, her nose and mouth lost in the shadow of her arm. Before nightfall, I often stood outside the house for hours, never swimming or walking along the sand. I waited at the gate, gazing up at Wanda, wondering what she saw. But what does it matter now? I was only twelve years old, too young to realize Wanda’s behavior fascinated me for all the wrong reasons.
  I thought I could see what she saw. I thought if I looked long enough I could discover what was waiting outside the window. Sometimes I still think there’s something out there, something that only Wanda saw but no one else could see. Now, whenever I drink my gin in darkness, I hold my glass high and think, Here’s hoping she had wonderful eyes. At least, my fondest wish is that she gave me up for something real, not what she imagined.
  Now that the others are gone, I live here in the summerhouse alone. The beaches have changed and grown more crowded every year. But I’m still afraid to look out the windows at night – not because someone might be lurking outside but because I see nothing but the dark shore and yet feel so much terror I have to stand at the windows until dawn. I don’t want to be like Wanda, a woman afraid of sleeping in the dark.
  Dougy was a slave to her fears, and so was I. But I was nothing like him. He drank three bottles of cheap wine every night and tried to force Wanda to do the same so she would take her clothes off and dance on the shore. I hated Dougy and wanted him to die a lingering death underwater. In the afternoons, he made my sister laugh like a whore, her mouth gaping wet, laced with spit strings, full of glittery darkness. Her laughter was followed by long silences.
  “Here,” Dougy would often say, “take this.”
Once he offered me a bottle of stale wine, a gob of kinky hairs floating on the burgundy liquor. The label was peeling away, leaving gold traces on his palms. Flecks of metallic paper caught in his tangled beard and nestled deep into the corners of his lips.
  Wanda ignored him and walked to the window. The sun was still high. A group of children ran out into the water, screaming and shoving one another farther from the shore.
  “Want to go outside?” he asked, his nose buried in her hair. She didn’t answer. I watched his eyes glaze over, gazing at me cruelly before he guzzled the last wine, stray hairs and all. He relaxed his fingers, letting the bottle drop to the carpet before kicking it across the room.
  “What?” he asked, looking at me strangely.
  “I didn’t say anything.”
  “All right, then.”

Later that night, Wanda and I were silent as we watched the moonlit shore from the high windows. Dougy took possession of our aunt in darkness without ever bothering to remove her corset. The ocean was lapping their legs. Joan shouted obscenities as Dougy mounted her like a crazed horse and she arched her back, stiff as a mechanical doll. When she finally shouted my father’s name, Dougy jerked away from her.
  Afterward, Dougy ran back to the house, yanking at his jeans. Joan lay on the shore for a long time, her face in the sand.
  Somehow Wanda was never the same after that night. Neither was I or the summerhouse or the rest of the family. I have no idea who else might have seen Joan and Dougy through the other windows or what my parents and the old folks might have heard.
  I didn’t know what to say to Wanda when she finally left the window and turned to me. I tried to hug her, but she pushed me away.
  “The people I love don’t exist anymore and haven’t for quite some time,” she said, “even though they still live with me in the same house.”

When I reach for the family album, the photos are almost too much for me. I’ll burn them before I die, before I have to think of my sister curled up in the long hammock, the white woven cords stretched tight under her weight. Her skin was luminous, shades lighter than her hair. When I look back at summer photographs, Wanda standing just behind me, my head barely reaching the crook of her arm, I see now what I couldn’t have realized then. My sister and I looked nothing alike. She was on the verge of becoming a great beauty. Her thick auburn hair curved, glistening dark above her white gown, her breasts huge in mellow light. My hair was dishwater-blonde, limp, and dull. My skin, the color of petrified bone. My breasts, nonexistent. I was just a girl then. But in the photographs, I could have been an ashen, long-haired boy, a child living a sheltered life to serve her, walking with her violet pitcher of iced cranberry juice from room to room in sickly light.
  I would like to say it was a long time ago, but, as Wanda used to say, even a hundred years isn’t a long time. She had a comic timeline on her wall in the summerhouse, a line of figures representing human evolution as a series of shaggy apes growing hairless through the ages. Unlike my sister, I’ve never known the first thing about time. I wasn’t like the old folks either. I had no history to call my own. I was only ever aquatinted with the tiniest details, the useless moments no one else would bother to remember.
  I still only hold on to the smallest memories because of their gemlike quality. When I strand them together, they could reveal Wanda’s most intimate secrets or nothing at all. Nevertheless, they are beautiful to me, just as valuable as the lessons Wanda learned in her psychology classes. She learned how to take people apart, studying their lives as confessions to unconscious desires until even her closest friends became strangers to her.
  She told me there was only ever one history, hers and mine, and it happened again and again. According to Wanda, life was whatever we chose to make of it, like the two broken mauve goblets she lifted from a junkyard and displayed prominently in her bright room. Romance was the same since the dawn of time – a man offers a woman all he will ever possess so she will become his slave.
  As Wanda reclined in the hammock against brown velvet pillows, her gold necklace suspending a rectangle of green glass, I reached out for a cracked goblet and saw its veins stained in burgundy wine.
  “Don’t,” she said, not looking at me. She was reading a thick white book on how to make love, and “don’t” was the only word she had spoken to me all morning.
  “Dougy’s ugly and I hate him and Aunt Joan,” I said.
  “You’re so sweet,” she whispered.
  The book was cumbersome and full of black-and-white photos of naked people, women with heavy, drooping breasts and slender waists and men with fat stomachs and hairy legs. But I wasn’t looking at the men. I was looking at the women. I wanted to hold them and bury my face in their hair. That was the moment I realized I could never love a man. I could only love women all of my life, and I would always remember I was studying Wanda as she studied her book on love.
I learned nothing about romance that summer, nor did I ever learn. The closest I ever came was my admiration for Wanda and the chipped mauve goblets, the marred crystal rims that cut my hand once.

I used to watch Wanda pluck her eyebrows with tweezers, shaping them into sideways silver moons. I rubbed lotion on her legs and arms, lingering over her breasts and knees, so the heat wouldn’t dry her skin. I helped her rinse her hair in vinegar, eggs, and beer. After smearing a blue-cream mask over her face, she clambered back onto the hammock and asked me to lay cucumber slices over her eyes.
  “I want to look as irresistible as Aunt Joan,” she said to me before beginning a grueling regime of home-beauty treatments.
  Our last night together, I watched her wallow in a tub full of olive oil. I poured it in a slow stream over her shoulders so her skin could drink of its richness. Her hair stuck to her skin in a flat and glossy web. She was falling all over herself as she tried to rise from that tub, her feet sliding out from under her so she had to hold on to me. I grabbed her arms as she stood, but her wrists were so slick with oil that they began to slip through my hands. Or rather, I let them slip.
  “Oh, God,” she said, laughing as she clung to me. My shirt was ruined, soaked in oil.
  Dougy was waiting outside the door, laughing and demanding to take a picture of Wanda while she was still wet and luminous. She was so beautiful that night he forgot to put film in his camera. She was laughing and holding on to my shoulders when he snapped the shot.
  “I love you. God, I love you,” she said, her arms wrapped around my waist as she kissed my hair. I didn’t believe her, so I pushed her away instead of returning her embrace. That would be the last time we held each other.
  Later that night, naked and alone, she went for a walk along the beach and jumped off a bridge near our house. No one saw her go. Her face had always been so lovely that it didn’t make sense the way strangers found her, her head next to a shattered melon on the rocks, dark blood mingling with the bridge’s shadow.
I wasn’t allowed to see her face at the closed-coffin funeral where Dougy tried to open the casket, begging to touch her hair one last time. Father wouldn’t let him touch her – neither would Mother and neither would I.
  Aunt Joan was leaning against me, her hands on my shoulders. I knew the old folks were standing behind us, but I couldn’t bear to look back at them. As far as I could tell, none of us could stand to look at one another. No one would speak to me during the wake, so I began to speak to myself in a voice so soft no one else could hear me.
  I told myself I would have followed my sister to the edge of any shore. But I couldn’t have believed she would have taken her own life. I was searching for some other explanation for why she never came back home. I never found one.
She seemed truly happy that night. She had a baby inside her that no one would ever see. Lovely as she was, she was laughing, and so was I, even though I felt her arms slipping through my hands.