THE MISSING SISTER by Julie Wade
Kellie and I slept in matching twin beds in a peptic-pink bedroom with lace curtains and faux geraniums on the windowsills until we were thirteen – maybe fourteen. In the end, it was decided that this had been going on long enough and we would have to attend separate high schools. I stayed home and went to an all-girls Catholic day school in Seattle. Kellie was sent to boarding school in British Columbia. Even the schools were called sisters, which made us laugh.
We wrote frantic letters at first, but over time, they became less frequent, then tapered off all together, which I suppose was part of the Master Plan. She had her friends, and I had mine. By junior year, she even had a boyfriend – I forget his name, but something generic like Todd or Brad. I don’t remember who stopped writing first, but this is the last plangent letter I placed in our mailbox:
Dear Kellie,
I miss the way you used to say “The jig is up,” but I guess for us, it really is. I can’t imagine what my childhood would have been like without you. No diary was sufficient for all I had to confide, and sometimes everyone needs someone who can read her mind. You knew everything, even before I did, and you were never afraid. You said, “One day we’re going to grow up and leave this place.” Of course you planned to go in a hot air balloon like Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz. On that point, I was more practical. I knew we’d need bus tickets or a car, but somehow I always believed we’d leave here together.
Love,
Julie
I was born on Wednesday, September 5, 1979. My mother spent 36 hours in labor at Swedish Hospital and said it seemed fitting that she had to work so hard for the only thing she ever wanted – a child. Well, really, a daughter. Of course later on she would say giving birth to me was the easiest part; that if she had known what she was in for, she never would have complained about the labor.
My mother knew, going in, that I would be her only, so she must have been plenty surprised when Kellie came along a few years later. It was more convenient for us to share a birthday, since we shared everything else anyway.
We had all the same toys and all the same clothes, but no duplicates, so we never dressed the same way on the same day, and no one at school or around the neighborhood ever confused us because, in reality, we looked absolutely nothing alike.
Kellie was small for her age and shaped like a Popsicle, her legs spindly as taupe-colored sticks on which the rest of her body was balanced. She stood like that, small and straight with two fishtail braids trailing down her back, knees squeezed tight together with only a slight crease dividing them. She embodied a flower-on-a-stem sort of innocence, which hid the vixen in her heart, and she had a soft, girlish voice to disguise her big, gusty lungs prone to loud singing and squeals of mischievous laughter. Kellie had fair hair and a freckled hologram of a face and never wore glasses like I did. She was the lucky one; she got to have braces instead.
When our Aunt Linda was still alive, we used to spend a lot of time with her. “I think,” Kellie said, “that there are two kinds of grown‑up women – angry ones, like Mom, and sad ones, like Aunt Linda.” But the thing about angry women, particularly if they happen to be your mother, is that they’re mostly resolved to be mad at you no matter what you do. Sad women are different. You can cheer them up, even if it doesn’t last long, and we liked to cheer Aunt Linda, to tell her stories while we perched on the pink tile countertop or the slippery lip of the Comet-clean tub in our grandmother’s spotless bathroom.
“You’re the only person in our family with green eyes,” we inform Aunt Linda.
“I know. You always remind me,” she smiles.
“But how is that? Everyone in this family has blue eyes but you.”
She shrugs her narrow, round shoulders. “It’s a mystery, I guess,” and stretches her eyelid wide so she can slide the slick, rubbery half-moon over her pupil.
Kellie and I look at each other and wince. “How do you touch your eyeball like that?” Kellie exclaims.
“Practice. I’ve been wearing contact lenses for years now. They’re simple enough, as long as you get the soft kind.”
“Mom wants me to get contacts,” I sigh, “but do you think there’s really anything wrong with glasses?”
Aunt Linda turns away from the mirror to address me directly. “There is nothing at all wrong with glasses. It’s only a preference – lenses that stick right to your eyes or lenses that sit at a distance. Either way, we just want you to be able to see.”
Kellie and I must have been pretty young then. Aunt Linda was still wearing her purple track suit, which meant she was still riding her bicycle on a regular basis, which meant she was healthier and happier than she would later become, but we could still tell that she was sad. The best part was when she took out her make‑up from the cabinet: pink lipstick in a long, sleek tube; the magic mascara wand with its glistening black bristles. We didn’t know how Aunt Linda knew what to do, but it was plain to see this ritual brought her pleasure, unspoken because she couldn’t explain, even if she had wanted to.
“Mom says if you’re not married you have to wear your best face all the time,” I whisper.
“Do you ever think Mom might be wrong?” Kellie replies.
Then, we both erupt into laughter, and Aunt Linda shakes her head in the mirror. “Such a giggly girl. Such a good-natured girl. Why are you laughing now?”
I’ve always said I didn’t know when my sister was born because she didn’t break forth from the piñata of our mother’s body the way I did, the way I imagined I did. Instead, Kellie began to materialize, to take shape slowly in my mind – part Hayley Mills from Pollyanna, part Wendy from the drive-thru window sign – until one day she appeared, fully formed, in the spare chair at our kitchen table.
“It’s Saturday,” she says, nudging my arm. “Why are you still sitting here in your bathrobe and slippers?”
I look over my shoulder at my mother who is washing and sorting three sets of curlers in the sink: big pinks, medium whites, baby blues. “It’s perm day.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I have to get my hair permed. I can’t go outside till it’s done.”
“Did you say something?” My mother pushes a tea cart covered in plastic to where I am sitting, propped up in my breakfast seat on a stack of old phonebooks.
“No.” I hold a finger to my lips so Kellie will keep quiet, but soon I realize my mother can’t hear when Kellie speaks.
Dipping a long comb in a glass of lukewarm water, she begins to part my hair, which is thick and perpetually snarled. “Just think how lucky those girls are who were born with natural-curly hair. Just think how lucky their mothers are.”
“Why does she care?” Kellie asks, impatient.
“I don’t know. She says we have to do this four times a year, so no one will ever know that I’m unlucky.”
“When I’m through with you,” my mother boasts, “you’ll look just like Shirley Temple.”
“She says that every time,” I tell Kellie, “but it never happens. I always look exactly like me, just with bigger, pouffier hair.”
My mother never had any formal beauty school training. She was a retired school teacher who stayed home to “raise me right” and make sure I didn’t turn into a “hoodlum.” When I was three, just starting preschool and learning to read, she took me to the Southwest Community College Hair School to get my first permanent. I remember we left in a huff because the woman in charge refused to perm the hair of a three-year-old. The students there had been perming my mother’s hair for years, only charging her $5.00 and only severely singeing her scalp that once, sometime before I was born.
“She’s only a baby!” the woman cried, waving her arms so they flapped strangely under her black garbage-bag gown. “Her head is sensitive. We don’t know what these chemicals will do.”
“The same thing they do to anyone else,” my mother replied sharply. “Make the hair curl so it doesn’t hang there like a limp mop.”
On the way home, we stopped twice – first, to buy curlers from a discount supply store, then to pick up a year’s worth of Toni’s home permanent kits. I studied the woman on the box, her beaming face, her bright blue eyes and gargantuan red lips like the mouth from the Twizzlers commercial. And all around her, rising above and spreading beside in spirals of epic proportion, was the vast, mountainous, golden-brown caricature of her hair.
“What if my hair doesn’t look like that?”
“It will,” my mother snapped, clutching the wheel. “You’ll have those curls, come hell or high water.”
I was almost asleep one night – this must have been kindergarten – but Kellie had started keeping me up late with her questions, and this time was no exception.
“What’s your father like?” she asks.
“He’s your father, too,” I say, “now that you’re adopted and all.”
But it was funny because Kellie never came around much when my dad was in town. He took me to Winchell’s Donut Shoppe for breakfast and Taco Bell for lunch and down to the park at any time of day to play Frisbee or to walk on the beach. I’d come home with my pockets nearly splitting, agates and snail shells and sharp pieces of glass smoothed by the sea, blunted into little green stones. I’d spread these treasures over my bed, and there Kellie would be, sitting on her knees, sucking a Tootsie Pop, waiting.
“Dad’s perfect,” I say. “We like all the same things: Dr. Pepper, car washes, Barry Manilow. The best thing is drinking Dr. Pepper and listening to Barry Manilow while you’re driving through a car wash.”
“Why is he gone so much?” Kellie wants to know.
“Just for work – he’s a traveling salesman.” She looks skeptical so I lean forward on my pillow and emphasize: “It’s a very important job.”
The thing about Kellie is that she’s much smarter than people give her credit for. She would make a good psychologist or a cunning criminal, so I hope she chooses a career path that’s legal and pays a livable wage. Once, when we were somewhere around eleven or twelve, Kellie convinced me that we should watch Pretty Woman, which our parents had borrowed on a VHS tape from their friends who recorded it on television.
I was nervous because I knew we were going to get caught, but Kellie said it was their fault for leaving the movie out in the first place and that we could always play dumb if we had to. Then, she chuckled and said, “You know I’m good at that.”
There’s a scene not too long after the pretty prostitute meets the boring businessman where he catches her flossing her teeth in the bathroom. He says something like, “Not too many people surprise me, Vivian.” And she says, juggling her anger and sadness like flaming bowling pins, “You’re lucky. Most of ’em surprise the hell out of me.”
Kellie takes the remote control and punches the button we call “double hockey sticks.” The screen freezes, and she jumps up and down looking, at just this moment, like one of the skinny, double-jointed orphans from Annie the musical. “That’s it! Movies are brilliant sometimes. People should study them instead of books. I always learn more from movies.”
“I don’t get it. What’s so special about this scene?”
“It explains everything,” Kellie declares, “about us.”
I lay on my stomach with my legs sticking up in the air – “soles toward Heaven,” as our Grandma would say – and wait for Kellie’s impassioned soliloquy.
“Ok. So I’m the guy,” she says.
“Who? The old, rich guy who lives in hotels?”
“Well, not literally, but – hear me out. He gets people. Vivian’s the exception, but most of the time, he knows what people are going to do even before they do it, so he can get ahead in business and sell more stuff. You know, what Dad would say about the kind of salesman who can . . . sell an icebox to an Eskimo,” we recite in unison. “You,” Kellie says, pointing at me, “are Vivian.”
“I’m a prostitute now?” I’m embarrassed to tell Kellie I don’t entirely understand what this means, only that our father says it’s “the world’s oldest profession” and our mother corrects him and says “it’s not a profession, it’s a depravity,” and “the people who made Pretty Woman are probably going straight to hell.”
“People surprise you. That’s what I mean.” Kellie hits her fist against her open palm as if we are playing Rock, Paper, Scissors, but she does this for emphasis – to make her point clear.
“I never noticed before – are you left-handed?” I ask, suddenly realizing it is her left fist and not her right that she hammers into her palm.
“I don’t think so,” Kellie says, suddenly cautious. “I’m – ambidextrous, you know, like we learned in school. I can use either hand.”
“Which one do you write with?”
She shrugs. “Whichever one I feel like.” I can’t believe it. My sister is shy about something.
“Kellie, you’re left-handed like Grandma, aren’t you?”
“No, I’m not!” she protests, her cheeks mottled red and white. “I’m ambidextrous. I just like the left hand better.”
Our grandmother – who is mother to our father and to our Aunt Linda and who is an enigma to us because she never raises her voice, which is evidence of anger, and she never cries or looks downcast, which is evidence of sadness – had grown up in a small mining town just north of the Canadian border. She was the eighth of nine children, brought up in a close-knit community of Swedish immigrants, a place she spoke of with all the fondness and nostalgia of Dorothy’s descriptions of Kansas. But one story Kellie and I found appalling to imagine was when our grandmother explained about being punished for writing with her left hand.
“Oh, those teachers wouldn’t have it,” she said. “I was about six years old, and the teacher called me up to the board to write my name. And somehow I got nervous, and I wrote it backwards, and that’s when the teacher noticed I was writing with the wrong hand, as she called it. I was told to stand there and write my name with the right hand, which of course happened to be the right hand.” Kellie and I giggled; we liked plays on words. “But it was the strangest thing because, try as I might, I could never make that chalk feel right in my right hand.”
“So what happened, Grandma?” We begged her to tell us, knowing that every morning she worked the crossword puzzles with a cup of black coffee, a toasted English muffin, and a wizened pencil clasped in her left hand.
“Teachers weren’t very enlightened back then,” she sighed. “They slapped my knuckles with a ruler day after day, but I still couldn’t write my name with my right hand.”
“If you’re a lefty,” I tell Kellie, “that’s fine by me.”
“Look, I’m not a lefty, okay, so just drop it. And stop interrupting me. This is important.” She is pacing now and avoiding my eyes, so I decide it’s better to bite my lip and listen. “The thing with you, Julie, is that you don’t protect yourself at all. You let people surprise you, catch you off-guard, even people you’ve known a long time.”
“Like Mom?”
“Like anyone.”
“This is why math is my best subject.” Now Kellie looks at me, and for the first time, I notice a tint of green in her eyes. “There’s a formula for everything, even people. And it was people who made up math, so they oughta know.”
Kellie was onto something, but by the time she presented her hypothesis, we had already been cast in roles, our lives structured around certain expectations. Here’s a good example:
In first grade, we had our first in‑class spelling bee. Kellie and I were in the bathroom beforehand, and she whispered to me from the adjacent stall: “I’m going out on my first word.”
“What?”
“It doesn’t matter if I know how to spell it or not. Trust me. You don’t want people to think you’re a good speller.”
“Why not? I don’t want them to think I’m a dummy.”
Kellie poked her head under the green partition. “You can stay in for a couple rounds, but whatever you do, don’t win.”
I won. And then Miss Campbell sent me to the bigger spelling bee in front of the whole school, and Mom made me wear lacy fold-down socks and black patent leather shoes and a pleated skirt and an itchy sweater with a white starched collar, and Kellie just rocked on her bed and rolled her eyes. I had to walk up to the podium and speak into the microphone, and they gave me a list of words to study beforehand, and it’s like I told Kellie – it’s fun to learn words, I like it – but then Kellie said, “You’re not gonna like it if it takes over your whole life,” so when I misspelled “furniture” because I thought it had an “e” up front like the leafy green plant called a “fern” – our backyard was full of them – Kellie winked at me from her chair in the audience, and I knew she thought I’d done it on purpose.
The trouble with Kellie was that she was usually right. I was already going to the second-grade classroom for accelerated reading, and when teachers found out I was good at spelling, they wanted to groom me for regional spelling bees. Frankly, I liked the attention, but Kellie thought it was better to stay under the radar. “It’s harder for people to ask things of you if they don’t know you’re there,” she said.
We asked our Aunt Linda what kind of student she had been in school, and she said, “I was always respectful and listened and did my best, but mostly I got a lot of Bs.”
We asked our father what kind of student he had been, and he said, “You don’t want me to be your role model for that kind of thing. I had a hard time with it, and I didn’t try as hard as I should have. About the only book I ever got through from those years was Black Beauty.”
We figured Grandma was probably a pretty good student, but no one ever knew it because her teachers were too busy hitting her and making her stand in the corner until she stopped that “funny business” of writing with her left hand. But boy, could she tell a story!
By this point, our mother knew about all our covert interviews, and she decided to have a word with us about exactly what our future meant to her as a former teacher and straight-A student. The lecture was addressed entirely to me, since it had become clear that our mother held out very little hope for Kellie to, as she would say, “amount to much of anything.”
Mom was polishing the dining room table, and she had already finished vacuuming, so everywhere you looked there were cotton balls daubed with perfume planted on the newly cleaned carpet. The house smelled sweet and lemony, the way I like to remember it, so I sat on one of the “good chairs” beside the china cabinet and waited. Kellie sprawled between the piano legs, making faces.
“You are a very special girl,” my mother began. “And it’s our obligation as your parents to expect great things of you. I’ve always told your father that any child of mine was going to be well-rounded.” Here she stopped and counted with her fingers. “She’s going to take ballet lessons and piano lessons and swimming lessons, and she’s going to do well in all her subjects.” That was four, which seemed like plenty, but she kept going. “She’s going to have good manners” (five), “and she’s going to look good when she goes out in public” (six), “and someday she’s going to have a nice house and car and husband and children” (she was out of fingers now), “and of course she’s going to have a good job.”
I nodded, and Kellie stuck out her tongue.
“There are also some things that you’re not going to be.” Now I was feeling restless and starting to fidget, but Mom fastened her eyes on me like a tight button at the top of a shirt, the kind that makes you feel like you’re choking. “My daughter will not be pregnant at sixteen. She will not be pigeon-toed.” We both looked down at my feet as she said it, and I furrowed my brow. Did my feet look funny? Jason Frye was pigeon-toed and always tripping over himself and falling down. Surely she didn’t think I . . . “She will not be immoral or a drug-user or a high school drop-out or a smart-mouth . . .”
Kellie made a whistling noise that sounded like a fart and pantomimed our mother, saying, “Or a wood-nymph or a unicorn or a garden-gnome.” She was being ridiculous now and trying to get me in trouble.
“Is that a smirk? Are you smirking at me?”
I shook my head.
“Because it only took once with my mother. She caught me smirking at her, and she slapped that smug smile right off my face, and I never did it again.” If she had been an Italian mafia mama, our mother would have said capiche? and sent us off to the kitchen to make meatballs or something. Instead, she told me to go fold the laundry, which was my favorite chore.
“You better not tell her,” Kellie said, “or she’ll have you doing something you hate in no time.”
In kindergarten, we had to make a book of our favorite things. Mrs. Shields gave out a set of typed questions, and our parents helped us fill in the answers at home. Dad was out of town because it was a week day, so Mom told me what to write in each blank. For favorite food, I wanted to put “hot dogs with mustard” or “macaroni and cheese with hot dogs cut up in it,” but Mom didn’t like those answers. She wanted me to put “broccoli and cauliflower,” which weren’t even my favorite vegetables. When I protested, she explained that you have to think about what sounds good, not just what you like best.
At school, they always asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up. Kellie and I had already discussed this subject at length. She knew she wanted to be a stage actress and a street performer from Day 1, and she had this whole fantasy about going to New York City the way our grandma’s sister Great Aunt Ethel had done in 1922. “I wouldn’t die either,” Kellie insisted, a reference to the fact that Great Aunt Ethel died from not eating enough while trying to make it as a dancer and singer on Broadway.
I, on the other hand, was torn. I knew that what I most wanted was to become a private investigator and solve mysteries for a living, but I wasn’t as confident as Kellie that I wouldn’t die. “It’s pretty risky,” I said, “and I don’t want to carry a gun, and I don’t want to be shot by a crazy person.” The other option was to write detective stories, but I wasn’t sure that qualified as a real, full-time job. Kellie said I could also work part-time at a department store or as a dentist’s assistant, both of which seemed like fine ideas.
Our mother said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world, “Well, you’re going to be a pediatrician.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“A doctor who takes care of children. I know how much you like children,” she said.
Now children seemed okay to me at the time, but that was probably because I was one of them. When I grew up, wouldn’t I want to spend my time with other grown‑ups? Later, when Mrs. Shields asked us to explain why we wanted to be the things we said we wanted to be, I said I had a very nice doctor named Dr. Kumasaka who gave me a lollipop and a Snoopy Band-Aid when I had to have my booster shot, so it seemed like a pretty good job. Everyone approved of my answer except me, and of course Kellie said that’s what you get for lying, even if your mother tells you to.
But here we were in third grade, and our parents were taking us to the University of Washington to attend a day of events for children who wanted to be doctors. Kellie and I sat in the back seat singing along to Roger Whittaker songs and occasionally breaking into conversation. Dad kept his eyes on the road, but Mom looked back at us from time to time and frowned. Finally, she said, “Julie, really, you’re getting a little old for this imaginary friend.”
“I don’t have an imaginary friend,” I replied.
“Don’t be smart with me, young lady. Whoever or whatever it is you talk to – it’s not cute anymore, and your father and I agree it’s time to stop.”
I tried to meet my father’s eyes in the rearview, but he avoided me by tinkering with the radio.
“I’m not doing anything,” I said, and Kellie pressed her lucky penny against my palm.
“Bill, are you going to say something, or are you just going to sit there like a lump?”
“Well, I think you’ve made it perfectly clear. Let’s move on.”
“Oh, so I can be the bad guy. I see.” Craning her neck so she could hold me in her sightline, Mom and I engaged in visual showdown. Don’t blink, Kellie whispered, and don’t look away. If you do, she’ll think you’re ashamed.
“Julie, it’s not just me. Your father has said it himself a number of times. The way you talk to yourself is unbecoming, it’s embarrassing, and it’s not normal. Do you want to be a weirdo? Is that what you want? Do you only want to have weirdo friends, because that’s the only kind of kid who’s going to want to play with you if you keep this up?”
You should tell her her eye shadow looks stupid, Kellie said. That’ll send her through the roof.
Kellie was referring to the fact that our mother had gotten an anonymous letter at school – probably from one of the other mothers or maybe from a teacher – that said, “You think you’re so important walking around here all the time like you own the place. You think you’re so much smarter than everyone else just because you used to be a teacher. Well, what kind of example of Christian decency are you setting with all that make‑up? Who do you think you are – Donna Mills?” We didn’t know who Donna Mills was, but I guess she must have worn a lot of bright blue eye shadow and red rouge and hot pink lipstick and dark blue eye liner. Maybe Donna Mills was a clown.
Nonetheless, Mom was breaking me down. “Dad?” I felt the lump in my throat rising, the bad feeling that comes before tears or after eating waffles too fast.
“Julie, there’s nothing wrong with you, honey. I just want you to make more of an effort to – ”
“What?”
“Can you just try to fit in please? For your own sake? I know you get lonely sometimes . . .”
His voice trailed off, and our mother rushed to fill the silence. “She doesn’t get lonely, Bill. Stop making excuses for her.”
All and all, Kellie and I had a bum time visiting the medical school and couldn’t wait for it to be over. I told our parents that if I was going to be a doctor at all, I would want to be a dentist because I’m interested in teeth and mouths and all the neat equipment they get to use, and Dad said it sounded like I was really talking about orthodontics, and Mom said it didn’t matter anyway because dentists and orthodontists weren’t real doctors. Dad said it was ok with him if I wanted to be an “oral surgeon,” but Mom said she wanted me to go into family practice as someone with an M.D. “When you do it,” she said, “you’ll be set for life.”
I’d like to say that Kellie talked me into things, that she was the instigator of all our mischief, and of course I sometimes did say this, when I was feeling vulnerable or covering my tracks. But the truth is, I took advantage of Kellie sometimes too, pretended I was doing her a favor when I wanted the same things she did, only more.
We had been to the circus a few times and also to the Ice Capades, but our mom didn’t want us to get candy there. She kept talking about what a “rip-off” it was, how the prices were inflated because the people who ran the show thought the people who paid tickets to go were some kind of “suckers.” Dad said he thought we should at least be allowed to share a bag of cotton candy or a junior-size snow cone, but instead, our mom made up pop popcorn at home in the old-fashioned air popper that had been known to short out and had once caught on fire. We then apportioned the popcorn into 3 paper bags and wrote “MOM,” “DAD,” and “KIDS” on them with a black Sharpie. No salt and no butter were permitted, so the popcorn tasted like white cardboard florets, and worst of all, we had to smuggle it in at the bottom of our mother’s oversized bag. When the ushers came around or folks from the concessions stand, we had to stop chewing mid-bite and keep our hands in the bag, motionless under our jackets. Dad tried to make a game of it, telling me how this was like espionage and we should pretend we were on a secret mission. Kellie said, “He means well, but who has to eat popcorn under cover?”
So one day, Kellie and I were playing in our room, and she had this idea. She said, “If we can’t have what we want at the circus, why not make it at home?” I reminded her that we had already tried to make our own Rainbow Brite dolls and what a fiasco that turned out to be. Kellie thought this was different.
“What we want most are caramel apples to eat and face-paints for recreation, right?”
I nodded.
“Well, think about it. A caramel apple is really just an apple with a stick in it covered in peanut butter and turned upside down on wax paper. And face-paints are really just markers.”
Mom was working outside in the garden, which was convenient for us because we could keep an eye on her from almost any window in the house. Kellie climbed up on the counter and handed me peanut butter, wax paper, and toothpicks. The toothpicks proved too small, so we used butter knives and lodged them “in the apples’ butts,” Kellie said, grinning. Soon, we had four green apples swathed with peanut butter, arranged in assembly line formation across the kitchen table.
“Can we eat them now?” I asked.
“No, I think they have to settle or harden or something.”
Next, we pulled back our hair and tied kerchiefs around our heads the way our mother did when she had a messy task at hand. Kellie wanted me to paint a mouse on her cheek because she said mice were sneaky and the best ones always got their cheese. When I had done it, she said, “Ok, what do you want?” and I told her I thought a turtle would be nice because they aren’t quick but they do have a lot of determination.
I don’t know how we thought we’d get away with it – I guess we weren’t thinking at all – but it was about this time, our cheeks newly decorated and our mouths salivating for the taste of homemade caramel apple, that Mom came in from the garden and intercepted us in the hall. “What kind of stunt are you pulling?” she demanded.
We stood still, frozen, two bodies sharing one shadow.
“Come into the light,” Mom said, grabbing each of us by the arm and dragging us into the kitchen.
“What in God’s name . . .” That’s when she saw the caramel apples on the table, and it was clear we were going down for this – what Kellie called submarining – but for some reason, this time I didn’t keep my mouth shut.
“You wouldn’t let us have it at the circus, and Dad always says where there’s a will, there’s a way, so we had the will, and we got our way, and you couldn’t stop us.”
Kellie told me later I scared her. She said, “Anger is like chicken pox. It can be contagious. You don’t want to get it from Mom.”
This was the time Kellie and I got our mouths washed out with soap. It always sounded like a made‑up punishment, the same as a whipping boy seemed like a made‑up person to take the prince’s punishments for him. I told my teacher, “I think the whipping boy is just in the prince’s imagination. When he’s being beaten, he pretends it’s happening to someone else. That’s how he can survive it.”
But the soap was real, and the sink was real and our mother’s rage was real as she forced the bar of Ivory into my mouth, pushing it back as far as it would go until I started coughing and sputtering. She told me to bite down and hold it there, and she would set a timer. When the bell rang, and not before, I could take the soap out and rinse my mouth and start cleaning up the kitchen.
I sat down on the fluffy pink toilet cover and looked over at Kellie, who was sitting cross-legged on the scale. She had a bar of soap in her mouth too, sticking out like a huge, swollen, white tongue. We were lucky that we didn’t need our mouths to talk.
She got you, too? I asked, bewildered.
Kellie shrugged. Yeah. So?
But why? You’re a mouse, remember. Quiet as a mouse. Always get your cheese.
It’s ok. We’re in this together. Whatever happens to you, I can take it. From now on, whatever happens to you happens to me, too.
At Christmastime, and often during summer vacation, our Grandma’s other sister – the one who survived and became a banker and didn’t marry until she was fifty-five but never had children – would come to visit us all the way from Victoria, B.C. I used to think B.C. meant “Before Christ” the way those same initials did in school, and for a while it made sense because Great Aunt Ruth was sixteen years older than our grandmother, and our grandmother was unbelievably old.
In addition to being “good with figures” and “a sharp cookie,” comments frequently made about our Aunt Ruth by other members of the family, there were two peculiar facts that Kellie and I found especially fascinating. First, Aunt Ruth was five feet seven inches tall and had never weighed, in her entire B.C. life, more than a hundred pounds. She was the thinnest, veiniest, boniest woman you ever saw, but she had the appetite of a horse and ate 2 eggs, 3 strips of bacon, and triangle-cut toast with marmalade every morning for breakfast. At dinner, she always took second helpings and after waiting an appropriate amount of time, inquired what there was for dessert.
The other peculiar fact was that Aunt Ruth had never owned a pair of pants, in contrast to our grandmother, who had recently acquired her first pair of blue denim jeans and navy blue Keds walking shoes. Aunt Ruth wore only two-piece suits comprised of skirt and jacket or fitted dresses with long sleeves and a hemline that came to rest, invariably, at the tops of her knees. When she traveled, she always wore a beige trench coat and beige low-heeled shoes and a round hat that perched on her head like an upside-down bowl. Our dad would drive us down to the waterfront so we could watch the Victoria Clipper dock at the main port and the passengers process formally from the ship into the customs building.
Not one official ever suspected Aunt Ruth of the annual misdemeanors she committed. Under that hat, which she tipped in her quasi-Canadian way, she was smuggling Aplets and Cotlets and fruitcakes and other strange assortments of chocolate and orange or chocolate and raspberry or even chocolate and pomegranate. For some reason, Canada was extremely protective of its fruit, and to avoid any trifling with her luggage, Aunt Ruth crossed international waters wearing a dapper cap filled with edible contraband. Kellie, who was scrawny as a scarecrow and innately predisposed to hijinks, seemed to resemble Aunt Ruth most of all our relations.
“So I hear you like school,” Aunt Ruth says. “I know I always did.” She is sitting in our grandmother’s living room on the long couch, the one she calls the davenport. She motions for me to push the gold apple on the coffee table toward her, and we both peek eagerly inside. “June, you shouldn’t have!” she exclaims, delighted to find the apple full to brimming with red, green, and silver Hershey kisses.
Our mother has gone Christmas shopping, and our father is in the basement flocking the Christmas tree, and Aunt Linda and Grandma are making beef stew and mashed potatoes and homemade gravy in the kitchen. I feel good and safe, and my sister has wandered off for a while, though later I notice her perched in one of the best trees on our grandmother’s property.
“What subject do you like best?”
“That’s an easy question – Language Arts.”
“What is it you like so much?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I guess it’s about comfort. I feel more comfortable with letters than numbers. I know you and Kellie – ” clearing my throat – “I know you prefer the mathematical side of things.”
“Well, now, my husband Mac – you never knew him, sadly – he was a banker like I was, and we were both ‘number sorts,’ if you want to put it that way. He always said there were 2 kinds of people in the world, those who made a home in words and those who made a home in numbers.”
“You know, my dad says there are 2 kinds of people in the world – those who believe in God and those who don’t. And Ivar, the seafood guy, says there are 2 kinds of people in the world – those who like oysters and those who don’t. Don’t you think it’s strange that everyone seems to think there are 2 kinds of people, but no one seems to agree what kind of people they are?”
Aunt Ruth has a hearty laugh over this one, but she doesn’t offer an explanation for the question I’ve posed. “Your grandma tells me you’ve been writing a book,” she says.
“Oh, I’m on my third now. It’s the Krystal Jordan Mystery Series, and Krystal Jordan is a girl sleuth based on me and Nancy Drew.”
“Nancy Drew and me,” my mother corrects, strolling into the living room laden with shopping bags. And just as suddenly, Kellie appears beside me on the floor.
On our eleventh birthday, Kellie and I can’t wait to unwrap the packages. Aunt Ruth has sent a card with her funny Canadian money – twenty dollars’ worth – for us to spend on whatever we want. Grandma June has brought us the Spy Tech hidden camera, and Aunt Linda the coveted Spy Tech walkie-talkies, and our dad has stuffed the Spy Tech periscope and advanced magnifying set in matching gift bags because he’s terrible at wrapping presents and knows it. Our mother isn’t sure how she feels about all the sleuthing, and her ambivalence shows as she stands off to the side, trimming a jade plant, the dead leaves piling up in her apron pocket. Later, we all sit down at the table together for spaghetti with meat sauce and hot garlic bread and grape juice masquerading as wine. Kellie and I announce we’re going to spend the Canadian money on the Spy Tech long-range noise detection system, making us the world’s most perceptive duo, not to mention eavesdroppers extraordinaire.
When lunch is over, Mom wants to see me in her bedroom. She says she has a special gift she’d like to give me in private. Kellie raises her eyebrows in a way that says, Pretend you like it, but don’t get your hopes up. “You can have a seat on the chaise lounge,” Mom instructs, disappearing into her bathroom. Why the formality? Why the uncustomary dulcet tones?
She returns holding a diminutive parcel, wrapped in red paper with a miniature pink bow. It could be mints or gum or some kind of candy – maybe a roll of Lifesavers, which is my best guess. “Open it,” she prods.
What I find inside is a floral container, black fabric embroidered with colorful tulips and daisies. “Open it,” she says again, sitting down beside me.
Sure enough, there is a little gold hinge, and the lid of the tiny casket – that’s what it reminds me of, though I won’t breathe a word of this aloud – raises to reveal a tube of 503A Wet ’n’ Wild lipstick. “This is your lipstick,” I say, confused.
“It’s your very own tube,” she explains. “And look here – there’s a mirror built into the lid, so when you put it on and blot it, you’ll be able to see what you’re doing.”
“So it’s for dress‑up?”
“You’re old enough,” my mother says with a satisfied sigh. “You’re ready to wear it every day.”
“I think it might be against the rules. I don’t think you’re allowed to wear lipstick in fifth grade.”
“If anyone gives you any trouble, you have your teacher call me, and I’ll write you a note of authorization.”
We study each other in silence, and she runs her hand through my home-permed hair. “I’ve been waiting for this moment for so long,” she murmurs, and I see that her eyes are moist, and her mascara is beginning to trickle down like dark streams over the rocks of her cheekbones. “It’s been one thing after another,” she sighs. “First the hair, then the glasses . . . We’ve never had a break.” She reaches for a tissue on my father’s bureau. “But you’re old enough now. You can wear this lipstick every day, and you can even – here, let me show you – ” she lifts it like a lifeless body from its case and adds one dot to each of my cheeks – “make your own rouge. See? You just rub this color into your cheeks and spread it all around so no one spot is darker, and voila! You’ll be radiant. All the boys will start to notice you. Before you know it, you’ll be fighting them off.” She clasped my shoulders with some degree of ceremony, as if I was going to be knighted or baptized by full-body immersion. “This is your coming of age!” my mother proclaimed, and then she dissolved into tears.
“What was that all about?” Kellie asks when we are finally alone.
“She gave me lipstick. She says I’m supposed to wear it every day.”
“She should have let you pick it out,” Kellie sighs. “Why does it have to be her color?”
“Why do I have to wear it at all?”
“You don’t want to?” Kellie straddles the fence between our yard and the neighbor’s.
“No! I think it’s hideous. I hate the way it gets all over Mom’s apples and her tea cups and how she carries tufts of Kleenex in her purse with big kiss marks on them. I don’t want to wear lipstick. Dad doesn’t have to wear lipstick.”
“Duh. Because he’s a man.”
“So you’d wear it?”
“Not Mom’s color, but a color of my own choice – sure. It seems fun to me . . . like parent-approved face-painting,” she grins.
One of our favorite hideouts is in the rockery behind the dogwood tree our father planted the summer I was born. Mom told him to plant it to commemorate the occasion, so as the tree grew, we would grow right along with it. Now the tall, gangly dogwood was bursting with blossoms, turning top-heavy and tipping down in a graceful, poignant gesture that reminded me of weeping willows. Soon, we would be able to crouch beneath it, and even our feet would be hidden from view.
“Kellie, you know how Mom calls me a weirdo all the time, and you always tell me not to believe her?”
“Yeah.” We are sitting by the tree now. There is a light sea breeze. Kellie is tracing a line in the soil. In a few minutes, she will get bored with this conversation and want to play tic-tac-toe with decorative pebbles our parents purchase en masse from a landscaping store. I have to act fast.
“I think Mom might be right. I think I am kind of a weirdo.” Kellie keeps her head down for some reason. She doesn’t want to look at me. “Well, are you gonna say anything?”
“What do you want me to say?” she replies, a response she has never given before.
“Whatever you want to say. Whatever you really think.”
It’s obvious Kellie doesn’t want to answer. She peels the bark off a stick, snaps it in two, then tosses it over her shoulder. Finally: “Yeah. So? You’re kind of a weirdo, but you’re still my sister. What do I care if – ”
“If what?” I grab her by the wrist. “This is important. If what?”
“If you’re not what they wanted, you know – not what they thought they were getting.” She looks up and smiles reluctantly. “I mean, you’re not a custom order from a catalogue. They don’t get to pick everything about you.”
The year before, when we were in fourth grade, I told my sister a secret. I told her I was in love with our teacher, Mrs. Miller, and that if I could have one wish, I would ask to be a man and twenty years older so I could take her out for dinner and dancing. “We’d go to the Space Needle, and I’d drive a shiny red car,” I bragged.
Kellie didn’t say much about it, but she didn’t like hanging around every day after class to clap the erasers together and clean out the chalk tray. “We have to do chores at home,” she’d complain. “Let’s go down to the playground and play tetherball.”
This was also the year that everyone started whispering and conjecturing about sex. Kellie didn’t know much – not much more than I – so we decided to conduct a little research. During silent reading time, we borrowed the “S” encyclopedia, but we made sure to tell all our classmates that we were reading more about sewing so we could earn the Pioneer Girl domesticity badge. One page beyond “sew” lay the dense word-forest of our intended destination. Since we couldn’t tear out the page, we transcribed it, copying every sentence into our spiral notebooks and later inspecting the language of the text at home. We made another smaller list of words and phrases to look up in the dictionary: hymen, nocturnal emission, orgasm.
“It seems like it would hurt worse than playing soccer without shin guards,” Kellie surmised after we had completed our decoding and translation of the encyclopedia entry.
“It seems strange to me that people do this in their spare time. How do they decide when it’s the right time?”
Kellie was disappointed. I could tell. “I thought it was going to be something really awesome,” she sighed, “like going to a rock concert or learning how to drive. Mostly, it just seems complicated, messy, and gross.”
Then, for a little while, Kellie was older. She went on ahead of me to middle school, all the way to eighth grade, and new adventures were waiting for her there. She stayed overnight at friends’ houses more. She did community service for extra credit and traveled with a cheerleading squad. Whenever she came home, she had a different air about her, like she had gotten worldly all of a sudden, or – like the verse we had to memorize in Vacation Bible School – she had “put away childish things.” I wondered sometimes if I was one of them.
“You look different,” I said when she wandered into our room one night.
“In a good way?”
“Yeah, I guess. Did you do something to your hair?”
“Oh, that. It’s just glints, so it’ll wash out in a few shampoos.”
Kellie’s yellow hair, streaked with russet and auburn tones, was pulled back in a ponytail and tied with a ribbon. She was wearing a hooded sweatshirt with her name embroidered on the front in cursive, and our school’s mascot – Leviticus the Lion – loomed large and proud on back.
“Can I see your pom-poms?”
“Sure.” Kellie tossed me the clusters of blue and gold streamers and then turned her back to undress.
“Did they win tonight?”
“No, they lost. But I didn’t care. We made the best pyramid at the half-time show.”
“Kellie, can I ask you something?”
“Yeah, what?” She had wrapped a towel around her body first and was strategically removing her skirt, socks, and underwear, which she then deposited swiftly in the chute.
“Would you say you’re popular at school?”
“I mean, I fit in. I like people. They seem to like me.” I want to believe she’s the same person she’s always been, but it’s hard because she’s become aloof, more guarded. “Why?”
I follow her into our bathroom where she begins to fill the tub and draws the curtains closed before removing her towel. I perch tentatively on the toilet seat, pointing and flexing my toes.
“I’m just feeling anxious, I guess. I do want to skip sixth grade. I know I’m ready to move on. But at the same time –”
“Hey, can you hand me a razor and some shaving cream?”
“You shave?” I ask, incredulous.
“Of course. Every girl in middle school does.” To my surprise, I find a package of pink Lady Chic razors and a can of Skintimate shave gel in the bottom drawer where towelettes and fresh wash cloths are kept.
“Kellie, you’ll tell me, right – when you get your period and your first kiss and other things like that?”
“If you want me to . . . I mean, it’s kinda personal, but if you have a specific question . . .”
I can hear her slathering her skin with the creamy leg soap, and I feel nostalgic for an earlier time. “Remember when Dad used to let us watch him shave? We’d put shaving cream all over the counter and all over our faces, and then we’d pretend to shave it all off with one of the razors that didn’t have a blade. And then remember when he taught us how to tie a neck-tie, and we got to walk around wearing the tie we liked best from his closet?”
“Yeah.” I hear her splashing behind the curtain, and I want to climb in, the way I did before – when we were both little and not self-conscious about things like bodies.
“Kellie, is something wrong?”
“No!” she snaps. “I’m just – I just have a lot on my mind right now. You wouldn’t understand.”
“Oh. Are you sure?”
“Sometimes people just need privacy. How is it you don’t get that?”
While Kellie is still in the bathroom, I rifle through her belongings. I know it’s an unfair thing to do, but I’ve told her all my secrets, and it’s becoming clear to me that she has not returned the favor. In her duffel bag, I find proof of my sister’s secret life. She has a bra now – white eyelet with a pattern of lavender flowers – and a pack of Playtex slim-fit tampons like I’ve seen at the drugstore before. Liar! I want to shout. Liar!
When Kellie comes back to the room wearing a nightshirt and tall socks and her hair piled up on her head, I’m brooding in bed with a book covering half my face. She spends an inordinate amount of time applying lotion to her legs and arms, then combing her hair at the vanity mirror. I decide to be nice and offer her some of my Caramello, but she declines. She’s “watching her calories,” or something inane like that. Then, I notice the pinkish-brown spot on her neck. I say in my best concerned voice, “Oh, Kellie, what happened?”
“What do you mean?”
“To your neck. It looks like you hurt yourself.”
Her hand moves quickly to the spot, then attempts to conceal it with a long strand of hair. “Oh, I burned myself with the curling iron,” she replies, blushing.
“But you don’t use the curling iron. You always wear your hair straight or if you want it to curl, you go to sleep in braids.”
“Are you my sister or my mother?” Kellie retorts. “Why don’t you mind your own business?”
“You think I’m so naïve, don’t you? You think I’m just this pathetic little baby who couldn’t possibly understand the fantastically important events in your life. Well, I’ll show you, Kellie. I know exactly what that mark on your neck is. It’s a hickey, something Mom says nice girls never have.”
Horrified, she throws her retainer case across the room, hitting me square in the forehead. “Ouch!”
“You deserve it,” Kellie pouts. “How dare you accuse me – ”
“Of what? Of being the kind of girl who lets guys bite on her neck like vampires?” I’m so angry I can hear my heart pounding in my ears like hoofbeats.
“Well, at least there are guys who’ll look twice at me. At least I want them to look!”
Before either of us can say another word, our father appears in the doorway. “Julie, what’s going on in here?”
I’m flustered. I lean back against my white wicker headboard and exhale deeply. “Nothing, Dad. I’m fine.”
“It sounded like quite a ruckus . . . Were you on the phone with someone?”
I shake my head no, and then he comes a step closer, eyes full of concern. “Is that a welt on your head?”
And sure enough, I can feel the dark pain rising.
The Kellie I knew, my friend and fellow gumshoe, my partner in mischief and mayhem, came back to me the day Mom found my diary. It wasn’t like she just all of a sudden found it either. No, she knew it was there all along, and she went looking it for it, hoping to find answers to questions it wasn’t fair to ask.
In the diary, I said a lot of not-too-flattering things about her. I talked about the fact that my dad had told me that after my mother’s hysterectomy, she started taking hormone pills but she still seemed to have a “hormone problem.” I mentioned that at the end of second grade, Mr. Whited made all the girls in the class kiss him on the lips in order to get their report cards and that when it was my turn, I felt his tongue slip between the crack of my lips. I talked about the time I went to Lana Steeley’s birthday party and brought a photo album full of pictures I had cut out of a catalogue and when Erin Sauter started talking about her new baby brother, I showed everyone these pictures and told them they were of my new adopted baby sister. I also mentioned that sometimes I doubted God was real and that I wished I had the guts to flunk out of a spelling bee on purpose, but probably the worst offense was when my mom read how I wiped off the 503A every morning when I got to school and didn’t put it on again until right before she came to pick me up.
“Sit down,” Mom commands, pointing to my designated chair at the kitchen table. At first, I am looking down through the glass at the conch shell and the white pearly stones. Then, I catch Kellie’s reflection in that mirrored surface and realize she is sitting there beside me, in the empty chair, the one Mom always used as a magazine stand.
Don’t worry, Kellie says, flashing her smile of silvery wires.
“This diary is a disgrace.” Mom shoves it toward me. “What do you have to say for yourself?”
Tell her she’s a snoop and a thief, Kellie bristles.
“Nothing, I guess . . . What do you want me to say?”
“I don’t know, Julie. Let’s start with how you’re going to wear your 503A every day, and if I have to, I will call your teacher and ask her if you have it on.”
She’s bluffing.
“Don’t do that. Please. I’ll wear it. Just, please don’t call my school.”
She has the upper hand here, but don’t make it too easy for her. Once she sees you’re afraid, it’s all over.
“Then, I think we should talk about this horrible, mean mother of yours and what exactly we’re going to do about her.”
Careful, Kellie says. You’ll do time for this one.
“Mom, this whole diary was just a made‑up thing. Really. I like to pretend sometimes that I’m a big Hollywood writer, you know, with lots of skeletons in my closet. And since I didn’t think anybody would ever see it, I didn’t think anybody would get hurt.”
“I’ll know if you’re lying. Look at me,” she drills.
So I look at her, and I think how her eyes are boring holes in my skin, how I am like a dart board, and she is puncturing me again and again with her scrutiny, with her relentless determination to find something wrong.
You can do it, Kellie reassures me. You can convince her because she wants to believe you.
“And you’re going to dispose of this?”
“Yes.”
“Because you realize someone else could find it and form an entirely false impression of our family.”
“Yes.”
“And it doesn’t make you look good either. It makes you look like a spoiled brat and –” She is reaching for the word, and I know it’s going to be awful. Freak. Pervert. Lunatic.
“– like an ungrateful daughter. I swear, Julie, sometimes, I feel like I don’t even know you.”
She doesn’t. Kellie taps her fingers on the glass the way they scold us for doing on Aquarium field trips.
“All right,” Mom sighs at last, relinquishing. “Make this go away. The whole book – I want it gone.”
I nod, legs trembling underneath my chair. When I stand, Kellie follows me to where the matches are.
If Kellie were here now, it’s hard to know what she would think of my life, or for that matter, what I would think of hers. It’s hard to speculate about those twin roads of possibility and how they might have diverged in that fabled wood. What’s sweetest to recall are the late-summer nights lying out on the deck, our sleeping bags stretched side by side, the stars like moony eyes in a love song.
“You know what I like best,” she says, her palms propping her head and her elbows pointing out like butterfly wings.
“No. What?”
“The fact that almost anything can happen, and you don’t know what will, so your life is like your own personal movie you’re starring in.”
“I thought nothing ever surprised you,” I say, thinking I had her then, caught in the butterfly net of her own faulty logic.
“Oh, nothing ever does.” On this point, Kellie is without doubt, and she even sits up to explain. “Because if you look back, there were always clues. The mystery made sense all along. The only question is –” her face bright as a bulb – “how long it takes for you to believe it.”
Julie Marie Wade is the author of Small Fires (Sarabande Books, 2011) and Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures (Colgate University Press, 2010). Her essays have appeared in American Literary Review, Cream City Review, Gulf Coast, Seneca Review, and Third Coast. This is her third appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.