Alison - The Sisters Antipodes

Jenny probably never found an answer to the question she asked that night in New York. Ive never found it. There isnt one, just the stories our four parents might tell or the glimpses theyd give, stories that are each true enough. And if we had learned a single true story, would it have made a difference? The answer didnt matter; the question should never have mattered so much.

Ive thought about asking my four parents what happened in 1965. They will not welcome this book, and I could not ask for their stories without saying why, and I think this would only make their stories more stiff, more formal: a filtering gate, held up against me. But theres no point speculating how they would fashion their stories, as I cant ask. It would be stealing, asking to have something not mine, whereas what I remember and think is my own.

The subject almost, but not quite, came up recently with my father. I was driving with him and Maggys little girl, Cate, along a hilly road among weird geological formations and outlet stores in an industrial part of Italy, where my father had bought a farmhouse upon retiring. Somewhere among these eruptions of stone was supposed to be a stripe of the fabled mineral released by a comet that had extinguished the dinosaurs, and I was leaning out the window trying to see it in the jagged stones. Cate was carsick in the back seat, as truck fumes swirled in and we swung around curves and rattled over hills, so after a while we put her in the front seat to keep her from throwing up, and I climbed into the back. As she moaned and shut her eyes and pressed her hands to her forehead, I talked to distract her and hit on the topic of childhood injuries. That got her attention.

What was the worst thing that had ever happened to her? Broken finger? Black eye? Really bad cut?

She sat up and began bouncing in her seat, telling stories about dog bites and fingers jammed in doors. Then I told her about when Maggy was six and I was three, and one evening we were running around wild in slippery new Mary Janes, and Maggy skidded and hit her head on the corner of a stair. She screamed, there was blood all over the floor, she got a butterfly bandage. Cate knew this story and liked hearing it again, legend, twisting around and gazing back at me with her big opal eyes.

My father glanced up in the rearview mirror. I dont remember that, he said. Quite sure?

Yes, I was sure. He squinted to remember, shook his head. But I just dont recall it. In Washington?

Yes, I said. In 1965.

Surely hed recall it, he said, if it had happened. Surely I was much too young then to remember anything. I must have gotten it wrong or made it up. But I had the staircase and banister right, and how slippery the floor was beneath our new shoes, and the butterfly bandage Maggy wore on her forehead, and Cate nodded violently to affirm the scar, so finally he admitted he just couldnt recall; perhaps hed been out that evening. He glanced at me again, though, looking troubled, and his eyes went back to the hot winding road.

We were on our way to swim at the house of a friend of his, another Australian whod landed in Italy. The topic that afternoon got to cigarettes and how much everyone missed the little elegances of smoke, and I described my fathers orange cigarette drawings in the dark when I was four. Again he squinted at me, straining to see what I meant.

But I just dont remember ever coming in with a cigarette! he cried. And why should he, why would anyone, it would be like remembering brushing your teeth. But as I got up to swim, I suddenly wondered, and maybe he did, too: Had it even been him? Or was it not my father but Paul whod drawn those glowing pictures in the dark all those years ago?

As we drove home, he caught my eye again in the rearview mirror, smiled quickly, and said, So do you remember much else from Australia then? He seemed good humored, just curious, but there was something in his voice and eyes something that seemed concerned with collecting whatever hed left behind inadvertently and would like safely back in his pocket.

Hmm? he said. Remember much else from those days?

I shrugged. Sure, I said, but didnt go on, partly because I liked seeing him troubled, but partly because it would be too much, make me too weak, to reveal all Id hoarded. The rock where Id wait for him to come home, or the mark on my foot in the shape of Australia Ive always believed I got when I tripped on a stone, running home when he called me to dinner.

His glance darted once or twice between the road and me, but he and I are both mulish enough that after just one more hopeful Hmm? he didnt ask again. And I wondered what images might still be burning in the darkness behind his eyes, what, after forty years, still flashed inside him, let out on his blackout nights, the black itself streaming like light.

Because my mother is the one I know best, Ive heard more of her story than the others, and Ive worried that this isnt fair, that I must learn their versions, too. But then I think, No. Theyve had forty years to speak up. In fact my mother hasnt told much at all, as if it were a dream, and she still can scarcely believe that it happened. She does have a few fixed memories and has told me these in such a way that Ive absorbed them and know that no matter how I try to see through them, theyve colored my vision. She says, Oh, the others did it first. She crosses her arms and is certain. But she doesnt seem really to know it, to have proof; she only believes it, just as I wanted to believe the opposite. Because Im closest to her, I try hardest to look into the gaps of what she says to find a darker version of her, one closer to how she might have been seen by the others.

She has embedded in her mind the phrases that signaled the end of her marriages: Helens overheard, Theres a man at this party, and his name is Edward Cummins, and hes mine, so hands off. Six years later in South America, the ambassador telling her, Higamous, hogamous, womans monogamous. Hogamous, higamous, man is polygamous. I picture her hearing these words amid music and clamor, leggy and glamorous and a little drunk, and upon hearing them become that much more abandoned, fling out a hand, let an internal door fly open so that she could do whatever the bloody hell she wanted because they were, after all. Each time shes recounted these moments, though thirty and forty years since the events theres been a pause when she gazes away into the trees, the night sky, and in her face are hurt and bewilderment.

Shes said many times that she and my father really did love each other, that it wasnt all bad. The nastiest thing she ever told me was something ugly my father apparently said one of those dark nights in the little Canberra house. This was in the kitchen where she vamped for Paul in her yellow swimsuit. Yet the interesting part of this detail isnt the ugliness of what she says my father said but what she revealed of herself in telling it: She stressed the littleness of the house in Canberra, its littleness having disappointed her, the Stuarts house being far more grand. This was a new angle on the story. It altered the equation Id worked out, that Helen had gone toward the safer man, and the one more likely to succeed. Another item to file with this: My mother had met Paul, with my father, in Washington, before even returning to Canberra.

The hardest thing she told me is this: My father said either she must file for divorce or he would, because he wanted that woman. There it all is in that raw verb want: to be wanted, or not to be wanted, the only measure of value. Just being is not enough and not even an option, because you cant isolate yourself from the wretched human economics of desire and desirability, the currents of value and valuation that forever stream between bodies and eyes. Lucretius, like Epicurus, said: Eliminate your wants, and you will eliminate the pain of not getting. Epicureanism is not about pleasure but about avoiding pain. Want nothing, and you will not suffer; plug up the leaky jar. But you cannot plug up the jar and still live. You have no choice but to be porous and leak, to want and love, and need to be wanted and loved, and I have to keep learning this again and again, and it is painful every time.