IN OUR HOUSE, by Mary Kuryla
Nobody likes my sister. Even so, nobody’s killed her yet and she turns nine today, so I’m baking her a birthday cake. It wasn’t my idea. “God, take my right hand,” Mother likes to say (though she doesn’t believe in God), “I don’t need it with Desiree to get the job done.” She and Dad have gone to a farm for my sister’s present, a rabbit.
This cake is a nightmare. Why Mother couldn’t just pick something from a regular cake and frosting box, I don’t know. There’s a half dozen layers, and she bought unsweetened coconut – so I have to sugar it up with other ingredients. Will someone tell me why I’m going to this trouble when my sister hates coconut? She says it tastes like feathers.
Maybe Mother doesn’t want my sister to like it. “Jane may be thin now,” Mother says, “but any second she could lose her shape.” When it comes to Jane, Mother can’t think straight.
I don’t hear Jane come in from outside.
“What’s the smell?” she says, rooting mud from the tread of her elevator shoe with a stick.
I point to the mess she’s making.
She just stares at me, getting up to rifle through Dad’s tool drawer.
“I’m baking your birthday cake,” I say.
“How come Mom’s not making it?”
“She’s getting your present.” The rabbit is a surprise.
“She better get me that fucking rabbit,” she says, waving a pair of wire cutters for the cage she’s building, and limping out the back door again.
My sister has a terrible mouth. None of us can remember when it started. Dad likes to say, “Perhaps it was the baby bottle which elicited the first curse.” To which I say, “Good thing Mother breast-fed me.” Whatever my parents do, wash Jane’s mouth with soap, shake hot sauce on her tongue, the curses just get longer, so now Mother and Dad ignore them. Or try to. Once I told Jane she sounded like her dad was a drunken sailor, and Mother slapped my face – the first time in my twelve years. “You should know better than that, Desiree.” Sailors are a sensitive topic in our house. Both Jane’s dad and mine are in the Navy. My dad’s a Lieutenant, though.
“Perfect, Desiree,” Mother says as I pull the cake pans out of the oven.
“Damn ridiculous cake,” I say.
“You sound like your sister,” says my dad, setting a cardboard box on the floor
“Desiree will never talk like her sister,” Mother says. “She doesn’t have the vocabulary.” She hands me the porcelain cake plate with the marine blue trim. It’s printed in gold with my name and date of birth (we don’t have one for Jane).
“Oh,” I say, “I know the words, Mother. The skill comes in not using them.”
My father winks at me, believing I am witty. He lifts off the lid of the box.
Long, long ears rise up.
“Is it the kind she wanted?” I say, watching the nose flick.
“It’s a rabbit,” Dad says.
“Good enough,” my mother says.
I wonder if it is. If anything is.
Jane has opened her presents and is reading out loud from the book I gave her called Amazing Animals. The rabbit sits in its box on the dinner table. She’s named him Rude Boy.
“Listen to this, Desiree,” Jane says, jamming her toe into the heel of her elevator shoe. She does this, I’ve noticed, when she’s really excited. “The female pond snail has a vagina in her head.”
Mother hands me the cake knife from the good-silver drawer after I light the candles. Through the little flames I see Jane’s face above the book, the black, black hair and the eyes, shiny like a fox’s, in that pale skin. Such a pretty face, if only she’d smile. “The female octopus’s vagina is in her nose,” Jane continues to read. “If approached by the male octopus when not in season, the female octopus will bite off his penis–one of eight!”
“That’s enough, Jane,” my father says, taking the book out of her hands.
“A female tortoise gets itself ready to mate,” Jane goes on from memory now, “by eating its own –”
“Happy Birthday,” Dad sings in an operatic voice that makes us laugh. As I set the cake on the table, the rabbit’s ears bob at the rim of the box, edged in red.
I whisper, “Make a wish, Jane.”
Pushing right up close to the cake, my sister laps up frosting with her tongue. “Coconut,” she says. “Fucking-A!”
“Blow out the candles, Jane,” Mother says, sounding ready for bed.
Jane blows and the room goes dark.
“Mama, I want to cut the cake,” Jane says, reaching for the knife in my hand.
I look at Mother.
“The cake’s very delicate, Janey,” Mother says, pushing the cake plate toward me. “Let your sister cut it.”
“Bullshit! It’s my birthday cake,” Jane says, prying my fingers from the knife. Beside us the cake teeters – so many layers – as the knife drops from my hand and strikes the table. The rabbit leaps out of the box, spooked, hind legs knocking the cake. For a second, cake and plate balance at the table’s edge. Crash. The plate hits the floor and busts into pieces. Porcelain splinters shoot sliver arrows. One catches in Mother’s heel. She stares at the thing in her, maybe waiting for blood, but this, this is a clean puncture.
A hind leg thumps the rug, thumps the rug.
“Get rid of that damned animal,” Mother says.
Dad hits Jane harder than I’ve ever seen him hit anything. Jane stumbles out of her shoe to fall on the floor.
“Help your mother,” my father tells me, picking up the rabbit by its neck’s loose skin. He reaches out a hand to Jane. “Come outside, Jane,” he says. She takes his hand, solemnly, mute for a change, and they go, Jane without her shoe.
“It’s her birthday!” Mother calls sadly after them.
Mother falls in love with sailors, but doesn’t like the sea. Only once did she swim in it. “It pulls me out where I don’t want to go,” she says. She may have left with Jane’s father but she came back to Dad and me.
“Desiree,” Mother says and she hands me a trash bag.
I look at the cake on the floor, upside down but intact. Of course the plate’s history, my little name split in two. Mother lifts a lock of my hair, dishwater blonde like hers, and curves it around my ear before heading upstairs in stocking feet, holding her shoes high in one hand. Dad swings open the back door. The twilight’s behind him for a moment before the door closes. I scoop the cake into the trash bag. He doesn’t see me as he follows Mom up.
On the floor, too, is Jane’s shoe, every scary rubbery black inch of it. Outside she’s sitting with her dead rabbit stretched across her legs. Her sock bunched at the heel. I don’t think she’s angry. She knows how it is in our house.
I push my foot inside Jane’s shoe. The stiff leather cuts into my ankle as I get my balance. Though I’m older, we wear some of the same clothes, Jane and I. Still I am surprised by the fit. I wonder if Jane has tried on some of my shoes, pretending she’s me. I walk in a circle, going up, then slamming down on the other foot. How does Jane do it, come and go like she does, but make no noise? On me, the shoe is ugly, but not on Jane. On her, on Jane, the ugly shoe fits, and it seems to me now the way she walks is pretty.
Jane taps on the kitchen window above the sink.
I limp over in her shoe.
When I open the window, she’s yawning. “Are Mom and Dad in bed?”
“Probably asleep,” I say. “Sorry about your bunny,” I say.
“What?”
“I’ll say a prayer,” I say.
“Say what you want,” Jane says. “He’s sitting in my cage. Dad said keep him there until Mom cools off.”
“Oh,” I say, “I knew that.”
“You seen my shoe?” she says. “My foot’s cold.”
“No.”
“Find the fucking thing.”
“Say it nicely,” I say. “You know, Jane, people will like you more if you do.”
Mary Kuryla’s stories have appeared in Alligator Juniper and The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses XXIII. She also wrote and directed the feature-length film, Freak Weather, which premiered in the Toronto International Film Festival.