The Wrong Sister Page 2

  “How is she not herself?” I wondered.

  Daniel looked uncomfortable. “I don’t know. I haven’t figured it out yet.” He sighed and looked at my mother. “You should bring her home.”

  But there was nothing my mother could do to convince Rose to come home. “I love school,” was all she would say. She wouldn’t talk about Daniel or what might be going on at school. “Everything’s fine,” she insisted. She took her own time, and when Rose finally arrived back to us, it was winter and everything seemed changed. She came home looking different, more beautiful but more distant. “Jesus, do you have to wear those slippers?” she said to me in disdain. Daniel was coming over to see her. It was the first time he had seen her in a while, and I wasn’t going to go with them. The phone began ringing, and every time I picked it up, it was another male voice, asking for her.

  “I don’t know,” she said into the phone, coiling her hand around the cord. “I have another date. Can’t we do it another night?” She looked flustered. “Really? You really mean that?” She smiled, considering. “All right. Pick me up at seven.”

  As soon as Rose hung up the phone, she looked suddenly nervous. “Stella,” she begged. “Can you do me this big favor?”

  I waited.

  “When Daniel comes, can you just tell him I’m sick, that I can’t get out of bed?” She motioned to her room. “I’m just going to lie down there.”

  “You have another date?”

  “I’m allowed.” She bit her lip. “I’m allowed,” she repeated. “Please, I don’t want to hurt him. I just— There’ll be other dates with him. It’s not like this is the one and only time. But this other guy is going home to California tomorrow,”

  “I thought you were going to get married. I thought it was forever.”

  “I just—Stella, Daniel was the first boy I ever dated. I was a baby when I met him. Now there’s all these things opening up for me.” She blew out a breath. “Please. Do it for me. Go get pizza with him or something. I’ll make it up to you.” She touched my shoulder. “I promise.”

  And so I did it. When Daniel came, dressed in a new tweed jacket, his hair longer, I lied. I told him Rose was sick, that she was sleeping and couldn’t be disturbed. He nodded. “Should I get her tea or ice cream?”

  “She can’t be disturbed,” I lied. I hesitated. “Want to go get pizza?”

  He studied me for a moment, and then sighed. “Sure. Why not? Maybe by the time we get back, she’ll be up and feeling better.” He brightened. “Come on, let’s go eat.”

  We ate pizza at Pie in the Sky in Cambridge, seated in a red leatherette booth in the back. There was a noisy, boisterous crowd of students, and when Daniel talked, he talked about Rose.

  “I don’t think she’s happy away at school, do you?”

  “She seems to like it.”

  He put his pizza down. “But she seems different. That’s all I’m saying. Or maybe it’s just because I haven’t seen that much of her. She’s always studying. I said I’d study with her, but she says she has to do it alone, now. I know what she means. It’s hard to concentrate on anything but the person you love.”

  We didn’t order dessert. He drove me home silently. “I’ll walk you in,” he said, “check on Rose.” But when we got in the house, my mother was home, and when she came to the door, her face was apologetic. “She went out,” she said quietly. Daniel didn’t even ask where Rose was. He said goodbye and walked back to the car. I peeked at him through our front window. For a long while, he just sat in the front seat, staring out ahead of him.

  Rose began coming home less and less. But Daniel showed up at our house more and more. “We should bring Rose home,” he kept insisting. He moped about our house. He helped me with my science papers, he stayed for dinner. My mother was happy to have someone to cook late dinners for, someone who appreciated her chicken Français, her duck à la Waltham. “It’s a phase with Rose,” she told Daniel. “You mark my words. She’s just feeling her oats.”

  After dinner, we would all play Scrabble or sometimes go to the movies, and finally, when it hit midnight, Daniel would go home. I got used to his being at the house and I told myself that I was angry at Rose for denying him. I called her at her dorm. “She’s out,” a voice said. I left my name, I said it was important, and although I waited, she never called back.

  Rose came home for spring break with her hair three inches longer and a whole pool of new boys who were in love with her. “Should we have Daniel for dinner?” my mother asked and Rose sighed, exasperated. “I broke up with him last month.”

  “You didn’t!” My mother shook her head.

  “He was just here last night, he didn’t say that—” I said and Rose shot me a look.

  “He shouldn’t be coming here anymore.” She flung her hair back, annoyed. She got up from her chair and stared out the window.

  “You don’t know what it’s like,” she said. “Everywhere I look, there he is. He won’t leave me alone. He’s obsessed. He’s making me hate him.” She turned to me, accusing. “Did you know that he follows me around at school? I’ll be coming out of class and he’ll be there, skulking in the halls, waiting. I’ll come home from a date to find his car parked in front of the dorm, watching, waiting. Every morning, no matter how early I wake up, he’s somehow there. He calls me up a million times a day and night just to check up on me, make sure I’m there, and even then he doesn’t trust me. He saw me hugging a friend of mine, congratulating him on getting engaged for God’s sake, but do you think he could understand that? Not Daniel. He called me five times that night, asking me over and over why did I hug him, what did it mean, why was I walking with another man, why was I lying, didn’t I trust him enough to tell him the truth? God! Every day there are five notes from him taped to my door. There are love letters six pages long slid under my door. Doesn’t he go to school? Doesn’t he have a life? I’m allowed to see whoever I want.” She flung off her scarf.

  “He loves you,” I said.

  “I’m having dinner tonight with this boy who wants to take me to Spain. Next week I’m going to a play with this other boy who’s writing a novel about me. And my English professor is going to let me walk Meredith, his sheepdog, in the Boston Commons with him on Sunday.” Her eyes sparked like constellations. “And tonight, in less than an hour, I’m going out to dinner with a boy from England.”

  She breezed out of the house that night. My mother shook her head. “Poor Daniel,” she said sadly.

  I felt sorry for Daniel, too, but I also felt something else. Wonder. That a boy would love you that much that he might ruin himself over you, that a boy would risk his own education and maybe his life to be with you and that it all might last forever, love never dying.

  Rose might have been orbiting away from me, but now that she knew I was friendly with Daniel, she was openly hostile. “Don’t give him any false hope about me,” she said. “He’ll just hang around me even more.” She was suddenly too popular to go into Harvard Square with me. She scrutinized me. “You could do something about your hair, you know,’ she said. She sniffed with disdain at the music I listened to. “Rock and roll—barf!” she said. When I ran into her in Boston, she ignored me. She couldn’t wait to get back to school. Her conversation with my mother was peppered with new names. David. Roger. Ben. Any name but Daniel’s. Any name but mine.

  Gradually, Daniel stopped coming to the house. He stopped calling. My mother stopped making exotic late-dinner menus and went back to her workaday pastas, her ready-in-ten-minutes burgers. “What a shame,” she said, but Rose was immovable. Rose even said Daniel had stopped showing up on her campus, trailing after her. Her mailbox wasn’t full of his love notes anymore. There weren’t two dozen phone messages from him, or personal notes he had scribbled himself, taped up along her dorm room door. “Thank God,” she said, pulling her hair into a ponytail.

  “I don’t know,” my mother said. “He was nice boy. I miss him.” Then I thought, I really missed him, too,
I really had lost Rose, and I had lost Daniel, too.

  It was May and school was nearly over for the summer. I was coming out of school, walking down the grassy backyard to the buses. Just that day a girl in my gym class had threatened to beat me up because she didn’t like the peace sign necklace I was wearing. I was saved when she had been caught phoning in a bomb threat. I kept to myself, I told myself soon, soon things would be different, I was going to go away to New York City to college. I would be a famous writer, by myself, without Rose. I would have many boyfriends because at college boys might appreciate a quick wit and a smart mind, curly hair might be beautiful there. I was deep in reverie, and then I heard the two blonde girls whispering, pointing and flirting, and I looked over and there was Daniel walking across the grass toward me and ignoring them altogether. He gave me a big hug and over his shoulders, I saw the blondes staring at me. I put my arm around Daniel and we walked to his car. I got in. The blondes were still watching.

  “You know,” he said. “I missed you.”

  “God, me, too.”

  I waited for him to ask me about Rose, what was she doing, who was she seeing, did she miss him at all? Or maybe he might suggest we go visit her, united we stand, both of us pulling her back to us, but he never did any of that. Instead, he took me to his car. “Let’s go get some muffins,” he said.

  We went to the Pewter Pot in Cambridge, where there were no waitresses but “wenches” dressed in tight black corsets and red skirts, bonnets bobbing on their head. We ordered fudge muffins and cranberry butter and hot chocolate with whipped cream. I felt flushed with happiness seeing him.

  Daniel drew a double helix in a spill of salt on the table. He smiled. “What’s the gene for stupidity? For false hope?” He smiled again and then reached over and touched my hand. “I’m having a good time.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Maybe I fell in love with the wrong sister.”

  He smiled, the same Daniel, easy, smart, funny. The wench appeared, refilling our water glasses. Tendrils of blonde hair were falling from her bonnet. Her pink lipstick was smeared.

  “So,” he said slowly. “Joni Mitchell’s playing at BU. Want to go?”

  “Yes, of course I do! It’ll be like old times.”

  He shook his head. “No. Not like old times. Like new times.”

  He reached over and took my hand again and this time, I let him. The wench walked by and winked at me.

  I went home in a confusion. Rose was there on a surprise visit, with a new boyfriend in tow, a blond named Merle who was singing a song he had written about her. “Raven hair and eyes like stormy sky,” he sang. They both ignored me.

  “I had cocoa with Daniel,” I said and Rose looked up, seeing me for the first time. She raised one brow.

  “He thinks he might have been with the wrong sister,” I said. My heart skated against my ribs. Merle looked at me quizzically. “We’re going to a movie Friday.”

  Rose seemed to go rigid. “So?”

  “It’s a date.”

  She grew silent, and then she looped one arm around Merle’s shoulder. “Date whoever you please. It has nothing to do with me.”

  The next day, the news that an older, handsome man had come to the school to pick me up, throwing an arm around me, was all over school. Ned Nickerson, the boy who sat behind me, who used to amuse himself mornings by whispering “ugly, ugly” at me, like a mantra, looked at me with new respect and interest. “What a nice day, huh?” he said pleasantly. Later, in the girls room, while I was staring at my reflection in the mirror, Debby Ryan, a cheerleader, strode in. “I like that shade of lipstick,” she said, nodding at my open mouth.

  I felt as if I had tumbled into the wrong school, but all day, things felt different, and I knew it was because of Daniel.

  “So who was that guy?” Marisa Filbert asked me in history class. I grinned, blushing. “Daniel.” A thrill shot through me.

  “Is your boyfriend a college guy?” She leaned closer.

  I nodded. Boyfriend. “We’re going to see Joni Mitchell Friday.”

  “What a hunk.” Her admiration washed over me like a cool pour of water.

  The night of the date, my mother was out of town on business, but Rose was home again, getting ready for a date of her own. She was in a bare black dress, her hair braided down her back, a single red glass earring dangling from her left ear. She watched me struggling with my outfit, pulling on a new blue minidress printed with yellow peace signs, a dress I now had serious doubts about, especially next to Rose. She frowned as I smeared on lipstick, as I tried to flatten my unruly hair with my sweaty palms.

  Rose leaned along the doorjamb. “I just want to tell you,” Rose said slowly, “that I think you are insane.”

  I ignored her.

  “He doesn’t want to date you. He’s doing this to get at me. You’re making a mistake.” She frowned. “He was my boyfriend.”

  “Not anymore.”

  She threw up her hands. “Fine. Do what you want.”

  When Daniel arrived, Rose made sure to be in her room, with the door firmly closed.

  I told myself it didn’t matter where she was, because Daniel stepped inside, dressed in a tweed jacket I had seen a million times before, but suddenly it took on new importance, suddenly even the way he had brushed his hair seemed new and different and wonderful to me. “You look great,” he said. He opened the door for me, and then I stepped out of my house with Daniel and into a whole new life, not once looking back to see if Rose had somehow snuck out of her room to watch us, to feel the same jab of envy I used to feel toward her.

  The concert was in an auditorium at the college, so crowded that we ended up sitting on the floor. Joni Mitchell was a pinprick on the landscape. I could barely hear her. I could barely see. The whole time all I could think about was how much older everyone was around me, how the girls seemed to know something I didn’t, just in the way they flipped their hair back or gazed at their boyfriends or whispered to one another. These were girls in blue jeans or long skirts, girls with no makeup and straight hair, and there I was in lipstick and my fizz of curls, in a dress so short, I had to keep tugging it down over my thighs. In front of us, a redhead and a boy with a heavy beard began kissing. He touched her neck; he pulled down the corner of her dress and kissed her shoulder. His mouth was open and wet. She licked at his ear. I stared down at my hands, at the nails I had bitten to the quick. Daniel’s foot touched mine, and I drew my legs under me as tightly as I could.

  I was glad when the concert was over, when Daniel pulled me to my feet. I wanted to go home to process this, to think about how I felt, what I wanted to do. “Come on,” he said. He took my hand and we went to someone’s dorm room. The door was wide open and there was a couple lying on a narrow bed together. They were rumpled and laughing, half dressed, and the sight of them was as intimate and shocking to me as a slap. I started, stepping back, unsure of what to do.

  “This is Debby and Mike,” Daniel said, nodding at them. T hey rolled closer together on the bed, smiling lazily up at me. Mike swept one hand over Debby’s face. Debby yawned and stretched and snuggled against him. Her white T-shirt rode up, showing a band of pale stomach.

  “Don’t think us rude, but we absolutely cannot get up,” she decided. Mike took a rope of her long pale hair and tickled her nose with it.

  “That’s all right, we’re going for a drive anyway.”

  A drive. I followed Daniel out of the dormitory and back into his car. He was talking nonstop, but I couldn’t snag my attention on any of his words, I put my hands deep into my cotton pockets. The night was thick with clouds. The air was so warm and heavy and yet I was shivering. I suddenly wanted things back the way they had been before, back when he was my big brother, bringing me books and chocolates, teaching me the best way to cook shrimp Creole, the way to appreciate a foreign film. I hadn’t minded when he had looped his arm about me when we were walking down the streets with Rose, when he had come to get me at school, with
an intrigued audience making us indelible in their minds, but now, alone, his arm felt like a weight upon me, his interest made me want to flee.

  We drove. I sat as close to the window as I could. He put on some music, guitars and flutes. “Let’s drive to Sudbury,” he said enthusiastically. I moved closer to the window. He glanced at me. “You all right?” he said pleasantly.

  It started to rain, droplets smearing across the window. When I was little I used to try to match up all the raindrops. I wanted them to all have partners, to never be alone.

  “Come sit closer.”

  “I think something feels wrong about this.”

  He drove deeper into Sudbury. The houses were spread out. The land looked rich. He turned and gave me a half smile. “I think maybe you’re afraid of things you shouldn’t be afraid of.”

  “What does that mean?”

  He smiled again. “Stella. “ He lifted one hand and brushed back my bangs, so my forehead was clear, like Rose’s.

  “I’m not my sister.”

  “I have always loved you,” he said simply. “You. Your sister. Your mother. Your whole family. I even loved your house.”

  I opened the window. The hot moist air struck my face. The rain beat in. My hair would frizz in minutes, but I didn’t care.

  “I loved your backyard.”

  “Can you just drive me home now?”

  “No, not until you talk to me about this.”

  “I don’t think this is going to work out.”

  “People say that when they’re afraid to even try. But there’s nothing to be afraid of. I love you. I do.”

  He drove faster. “Where are we going?” I said.

  “I want to show you the houses out here, how pretty it is.” And then, suddenly I felt like what it must have been like to be Rose, but in a different, more dangerous way. A Chevy slammed on its horn beside us.

  “Can you slow down?” I asked.