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At London, I step off the train into a jumble of bobbing hats and fat winter coats. Sophie is not Sophie. No jeans, no blue sweatshirt, no pensive gaze. Instead: a rabbit fur jacket, wool pants, a lilac silk blouse. She’s layered her hair; gold jewelry hangs off her ears and neck and wrists. Lipstick, bubblegum-pink; nail polish to match. Lilac eyeshadow beneath brows as thin as spaghetti. She touches my arm, leans in and kisses me on the right cheek. Then a woman’s hand, gloved, reaches toward me from a mink coat: puffy frosted hair, sunglasses, white skin, ginger-colored lips.

“My mom,” Sophie says. I picture graveyards, decomposing bodies, the frog I’m dissecting in Biology. A few seconds pass, Sophie smiling her candied smile, Sophie’s stepmother holding out her gloved hand. I drop my suitcase and shake the soft leather.

“Mrs. Steinhart,” Sophie’s stepmother says.

“Nice to meet you.”

As we pick our way over the ice in the parking lot, they make consoling remarks about Laura – verry sore-y – and cautiously ask if I’m still a vegetarian. Last year, Laura convinced me that cows have souls and tomatoes do not.

“I hope you don’t mind us roasting chicken,” Mrs. Steinhart says.

“No,” I mumble. “Of course not. “

Sophie ruffles her bangs with her free hand. “I told her you’ll eat fish.”

“Fish. Right,” I say.

“We’ll make salmon patties,” Mrs. Steinhart says.

We pull into the U-shaped drive of an enormous columned house and unload my suitcase from the Mercedes, which Mrs. Steinhart leaves running. She has more parental errands: groceries to buy, daughters to pick up from gymnastics. After she drops us off, I plop down on a loveseat in the high-ceilinged front hall, waiting for Sophie to revert to herself. She opens a compact and offers me her hairbrush.

“She seems nice,” I say, waving at the empty driveway. “What’s her first name?”

Sophie runs pink lipstick over her bottom lip. “Helen.”

“Is that what you call her?”

A sugary comic-book pout. “Let me show you the house.”

I can’t keep track of the rooms. Downstairs, they are all silver-blue – carpets, upholstery, wallpaper – trimmed with mirrors, blue-curtained windows, photos of Sophie and her stepsisters. Upstairs is easier: The colors frequently change. Pale yellow, creamy orange, light pink. It’s like walking through bowls of sherbet. I count six bedrooms, four baths, a living room, a dining room, a family room, a recreation room, a study, a summer porch. In her bedroom, Sophie shows off the canopy bed, the extra twin bed where I’ll sleep, the makeup she’s acquired: nail polish bottles, a paintbox of eyeshadow. She opens her own closet full of clothes, as nice or nicer than what she’s wearing: more tailored pants, more silk blouses, knit dresses, lambs wool cardigans, corduroy skirts. She fingers garment after garment, so obviously pleased I can’t help but feel depressed.

My own clothes – blue jeans faded at the knees, cable knit fisherman’s sweater – have turned against me. In every mirror I look lumpy and oafish.

Sophie holds a pale yellow sweater-dress in front of me and touches my arm. “You can borrow anything you want,” she says. “Anything.”

“I brought American cigarettes,” I say. “Is there someplace we can smoke?”

 
Outside, I feel better. Snow has been cleared from most of the sidewalks, but the roofs and lawns are still white, the larger trees a mix of white and gray. The wind has died down and the cloud cover has thinned, patches of blue opening up to the west. We walk for blocks, and the houses become newer, the trees smaller. As Sophie navigates the streets, she waves in the directions of her school, downtown London, the train station, Toronto, Windsor, camp. Sophie can be like that, I remember, she likes geography. But then she switches to describing her London friends. Shauna, who Sophie keeps saying is “fantastic,” and a brazen girl named Dina, and a guy named Perry, who is in grade 12, gorgeous and hilarious and very rich. His father owns hotels. She waves in the direction of one of the hotels Perry’s father owns.

“There’s a Bar tomorrow night,” Sophie tells me, “with a big reception.” She means Bar Mitzvah. “Shauna’s brother. We’ll go to the party. You can meet everyone.”

“Fantastic,” I say.

We slow when we reach a street of new homes and empty lots. Fields of straw grass and graying snow spread to the west. Behind a house under construction, we smoke cigarettes and eat mints.

“About your sister,” Sophie says. “Have they told you what’s wrong?”

I kick at a patch of dirty ice. “My dad says to be patient,” I say.

Sophie’s mouth puckers into a pink scowl and she drops her cigarette butt into the snow. Then she offers me another mint.
Without her mink, Mrs. Steinhart seems much smaller and more ordinary looking; without her sunglasses, more worried. She bastes the chicken and murmurs to Art Garfunkel’s breathy love songs, while the little girls cartwheel around their playroom. The relief I feel in the presence of competent mothers begins to take hold. Sophie and I set the table for six, while Helen washes the salad greens, scores and slices a cucumber. At 7:00 we hear the garage door close, and Mr. Steinhart pops into the house, sighing and round – round-headed, round-bodied in his suit, eyebrows one thick line across his forehead. He kisses Mrs. Steinhart in an automatic way and, for reasons I can’t name, my relief vanishes.

Mr. Steinhart nods to me, “Hello, Rebecca,” pours a gin and tonic, pinches Sophie’s cheek. His peppery scent mixes with the odor of damp wool and lunchmeat, and he stands close enough that I see a tiny razor nick beneath his jaw. “Buffalo,” he says. “What shul do you belong to? What kind of Jewish? Rebecca a family name? How long have you known Sophie?”

I answer, say all the polite things I can think of, and ask after Sophie’s grandmother and sister Debbie. Too late, Sophie makes a cutting gesture across her neck.

“Debra’s at boarding school,” her father says, his tone sharp. He raises his eyebrow.

“That’s nice,” I say.

“You think so?”

Mrs. Steinhart clears her throat and sets a tray of crackers and paté on the table. “Becca said her sister will be in the hospital for a while.”

“Yes, I’m sorry,” Sophie’s father says. “What did you say it was?”

“I don’t know.”

“What?”

“Well, no one’s sure.”

“They must have some idea.”

Sophie frowns at me.

“It’s probably pneumonia,” I say. “With complications.”

“Ah,” he shakes his head. “Bad business.” Then he turns away from all of us, and calls in the direction of the playroom. “Where are my girls?”

“Here,” the little girls yell in squeaky voices. “Here.” They rush at him, still in their pink and purple leotards, their hair in ribboned braids. He sits in a wide-armed kitchen chair and they climb onto his lap.

Later, while I brush my teeth and Sophie washes her face with Noxema, Sophie tells me, “It’s a girl’s school. Strict.” She shrugs and caps the blue jar. “Debbie likes to party. She got caught.”
In high school, Laura was a walking party. My parents discovered a fraction of her transgressions: smoking, drinking beer while babysitting Richie, using Mom’s Mastercharge to buy albums, taking the station wagon without permission, visiting a heart-throb dope dealer at Attica State Penitentiary (station wagon, no permission), visiting an unnamed friend at 3:30 a.m. (Dad’s car, no permission), smelling like pot, smelling like sex. This led only to shouting, slammed doors and weeks of Laura moping in her bedroom.
 
So far, I’ve been caught cutting class, twice.
Sophie falls asleep quickly, one arm flung over her head. No novel reading, no conversation. Her breathing comes slow and even, and the air smells of vanilla lotion. I listen to the kick and wheeze of the furnace. Beyond that sound, nothing. As if no one else exists: not the Steinharts, not my family. I close my eyes and try to synchronize my breathing with Sophie’s, which is too slow. I hold my breath, exhale, inhale slowly, hold it again, and suddenly I’m pinned down, miles from air and light, crazy white spirals racing under my closed lids and back through my temples. I open my eyes, the spirals swimming in the room now, between the dark hulks that once were the bureau and desk, the bookcase, the canopy bed, Sophie. The spirals spawn more spirals, elongated, serpentine, too close, as my breath speeds up to a shallow, spastic huffing. Hysteria. Hospitals. Spirals swallowing flecks of light, careening past the bed. Fourteen years old. Nearly 15. Stop it. Finally I stand, shuffle across the room to the door, the hallway dotted with night-lights for the little girls, the bathroom with its Bambi-faced night-light. I flip the wall switch. The spirals vanish.

Back in Sophie’s room, I drift off and wake in time to watch the dawn shift the air in the room from black to gray. My heart beats in my throat. I believe that “exhaustion” is code for “nervous breakdown.” Eventually, Sophie sits up and stretches, pink nightgown the color of the dust ruffles. “I wish we were up North,” I say.

“Buried? You know what it’s like there now? The snow started in October, maybe even September. No one lives there now.”

“There’s a town,” I say. “Haliburton.” A little town, with a diner and a grocery, a post office, a laundromat. A hockey camp. Small houses tucked into the woods. Beyond the woods, lakes and more lakes, more woods – maples, birches, pines. Dirt roads winding off to other lakes. Here and there, gas stations that sell coffee and cigarettes and Cadbury toffee.

“Well. Those people.”

Then the lakes and woods evaporate; I picture instead a rutted parking lot, a greasy shack, tables of heavy-set boy-men, their fingers shaped like sausages.
Before breakfast, I dial Wisconsin. I feel exhausted too, I plan to tell my parents. Maybe you should bring Laura back. Home. Now. I promise myself I’ll say yes to whatever they want. Yes, I’ll leave school and move to your hotel in Wisconsin. Yes, I’ll bring Richie. Yes, I’ll babysit. But already they’ve left their room. I ask the desk clerk to tell them “Hi.”

I drink orange juice, wash my hair with Sophie’s strawberry shampoo, rub her vanilla lotion on my skin. I wrap myself in thick towels and walk barefoot over her bedroom carpet, calm, the day off-white and glassy, as if the light is laced with codeine.

At her desk, Sophie rubs the color from her fingernails with toxic smelling cotton balls. I dress in blue jeans and a white turtleneck; she sizes me up and drops the cotton balls. From the closet, she pulls out a pale green lambs wool cardigan. “Wear this.”

“OK,” I say. OK to cherry lipstick, OK to matching nails. OK to modeling Debbie’s clothes, all of them – the dozens of dresses and skirts she hasn’t taken to boarding school, her shoes – heels, platforms, leather boots. Sophie picks out a black, V-neck cashmere dress for me to wear to the Bar Mitzvah reception. In the afternoon, we go to the mall; I spend most of my money on a pair of black suede pumps to match Debbie’s dress. In Eaton’s, Sophie lifts a bottle of Love’s Baby Soft cologne. Bad karma. We spray it on in the Volvo’s back seat.

By the time we leave for the Bar Mitzvah reception, I am Sophie’s twin, training my attention on hair gel, lip liner and earrings.

It’s like meditation, I tell myself. Be a Ming vase.
In the hotel ballroom, I take the rum and Coke Sophie hands me and drink it too fast. We wander between the tables of plastic-looking fruit and tables of gigantic desserts. The 13-year-olds disco in the far lounge; the adults foxtrot in the ballroom. Shauna – an auburn-haired girl with perfect teeth – hugs Sophie and kisses her on both cheeks, leaving lipstick marks. “Isn’t it fantastic?” she says, waving at the tables of flowers and food. She mentions Perry – at table nine, his uncle boring him stupid – then falls into a spasm of gossip about several people I’ve never heard of. She whispers dramatically and ignores me. A photographer snaps several shots in our direction, and white balls of light begin to blotch Shauna’s face and rain on the buffet table.

“Becca brought American cigarettes,” Sophie says, and I become visible again.

“Becca, you’re going to love this,” Shauna says. “Let’s introduce you around.”

In a dim bathroom two floors up, I hand out cigarettes to girls named Rhonda and Sandy and Jodi, Sarah, Lisa, Dina – Sophie’s Dina, the one she called brazen. From what I can tell, this means showing cleavage and knowing how to blow smoke rings.

After my second drink, Shauna’s friends become pink-faced insects. We’re in the ballroom eating strawberries. They use the word schvartze. They joke about the insanity of dating Catholics. Pure craziness. And why would you want to? I think of the white spirals and of beautiful Eddie Santora, a sophomore I’ve fantasized about.

Sophie catches me frowning. “Oh Becca, it’s not the States here, it’s different for us.”

I nod, but I’m queasy: Sophie’s giddy, she likes these girls, she’s dropped into relentless, idiotic happiness. I want the old Sophie, the tragic one, the one who remembers her mother is dead. This, I realize, makes me a pervert.

“You’re worried about your sister, aren’t you?” Sophie says, and the queasiness spreads.

“She’ll be OK,” I say. “Let me get us some refills.” I head off to the bar with the least vigilant bartender, away from Shauna and Sophie, into a swarm of laughing adults.


When Laura was in junior high, she’d climb the oaks in our cousin’s backyard, hang from her knees and swing like a pendulum – face red, hair a brown-black horsetail whipping four feet off the ground. Summer cook-outs, Halloween parties: Laura in the trees. The last time, she wore a smock top and jeans, and when she hung from her knees, the smock bunched up at her neck, exposing her stomach and white cotton training bra. In magic marker, she’d drawn rainbows over her belly, all the way up to the bra. You could see green and blue lines under the cotton, red bulls-eye nipples. Laura played deaf when Mom ordered her to get down. The swinging and the ordering went on for 20 minutes, until my aunt threatened Laura with the garden hose.

If Laura were here, we’d escape together.

When I return from the bar, a guy in a gray Italian suit is spinning Sophie across the kids’ dance floor. Olive-skinned, stocky, handsome despite the extra weight. Perry. They jitterbug until Sophie’s face flushes red and thick strands of hair cling to her skin. When they move off the dance floor, he palms an ice-cube and rubs it on the back of her neck. It occurs to me that he won’t be easy to get rid of. In fact, he’s invited Sophie and Shauna for a ride in his mother’s car.

The three of them round up a boy named Leon, big-chested Dina, and me. I finish my rum and Coke in the elevator to the parking ramp. A momentary blast of cold air gives way to the leather-lined interior of a BMW.


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Posted 01/01/09