wonder in her face. Once—only once that Annie could remember— Michelle had invited her sister to share it. They’d sat together and watched. The canaries would hop from the floor of their cage, where the feeders were, to the top perch in one nervy zigzagging ascent. The guppies or black mollies or angelfish would swim placidly along, then suddenly describe darting arabesques. Michelle’s face in those moments shone with the iridescence of the fish and the canaries’ yellow glow.
Stripped of her defenses, her sister had had her beauty.
Where did her defenses get her, anyway?
Blown away.
Annie was alive on this lovely spring day. Tall, graceful as a dancer, warm-complexioned, tints of auburn in her hair. She wore no makeup. Her eyes were dark, but not bold, not forbidding. They scared nobody away.
Lips moist, teeth white. The face of somebody who laughed.
She had started to cry. She went and sat in the obscuring shade of an Arts Quad oak.
Curiously, she’d never blamed the people who had set the bomb and denied her another chance to get to know her sister. In her art history class she’d learned that the cornices of buildings built three and four hundred years ago were falling all over Europe. Pedestrians were sometimes killed. The Old World was crumbling, and those who frequented its streets ran the risk of falling with it. That was what had happened to her sister. The Old World had fallen on her. The Old World was more dangerous in that way than the New, but this oak could fall too. If it did she would join her sister, and their father would have no one left.
Her thought had taken a turn. Life and death were such fragile, flickering things, such whims of the moment, such accidents, that all the records we kept of them were the biggest joke of all. We recorded history to keep from laughing, out of sheer terrified disbelief, at ourselves. This oak, for instance, made mockery of anybody who sat with her back to it pondering the meaning of life, and of what belonged to whom. My life belongs to me. Then, poof! What life? What you? The oak had been planted when they’d cleared the Arts Quad of its goats and cows. That had been at least one hundred and twenty years ago. It had seen how many generations of students into the grave? Administrators? Trustees? Presidents? And the university owned it? She laughed, inside, on a deeper register. Someone sitting at her side might have heard it as a growl. It would be an honor to be killed by this oak tree, she thought. Just to be worthy of this oak tree’s attention would be an honor. This noble oak. Sprung from a tiny acorn. What a joke.
Its bark hurt her back. She pressed against it, mortifying the flesh, as monks and nuns and other religious fanatics did when they failed to have God’s attention. Her tears had dried and her eyes felt parched with the heat of an unaccustomed anger. She remembered something her sister had told her that suited her mood. They were in Michelle’s bedroom, where Annie had gone to return a sweater she’d not really had permission to wear, and which didn’t fit her in the first place. She was two years younger than her sister but had experienced a gangly spurt of growth and was already taller. Michelle accused Annie of having taken the sweater without her permission, and Annie, defiantly, put it back on and showed Michelle how woefully short it was in the arms. In her memory, it barely came to her forearms. It was tight in the shoulders. Buttoned up, it made it hard to breathe. It was some pale indeterminate color between beige, tan, gray and green, and quite simply, it was like being wrapped up in her sister’s skin. Annie took it off and flung it on the bed. She stood there with her superior stature to see what her sister would do. Michelle took her time hanging the sweater back up in the closet. Then she turned and said, “You know what you are?” Annie didn’t, but she knew not to bite at her sister’s question. “You’re their backup daughter. You know what that means? You’re the daughter they’ve got left over in case something happens to me. The backup daughter,” she repeated in a quieter, more private voice, clearly savoring the phrase.
It wasn’t her sister’s meanness—Annie was used to that—it was the private pleasure Michelle took that caused Annie to lash out.
“That’s just you! That’s just something you like to hear yourself say!”
Still savoring her pleasure, Michelle said, “I didn’t say it. Mother did. Mother was ready to stop with me, but Dad talked her into having you, just in case.” Then Michelle turned to her closet and ran her hand along her clothes. “There’s nothing in here that fits a backup daughter. Try the Salvation Army or someplace like that.”
Annie didn’t doubt that the phrase originated with her mother. She could hear her mother saying it now. Michelle could be forgiven, at that uncaring age when she could be expected to latch on to anything with an authoritative ring. But the sentiment Annie recognized as coming from her father, the foreboding. The world could crush you—an Old World cornice or a New World oak—and suddenly you would have nothing left. He no longer had Michelle, and he no longer had his wife. He had her, Annie, his backup.
He would not have put it that way. He would have said, Please, give me more life.
A book bag hit the dirt beside her. “It’s been realpolitik from the start. If students in the ’60s had known anything about American history they wouldn’t have felt so disillusioned.”
“Saltonberg?” she said.
“You left before he got to the good stuff. If we’re good at getting our innocence crushed, it’s because we defend our ignorance like nobody else.”
“I’ve heard it all before.”
“Carolyn . . . whatever her name is, the blond that sits on the front row . . . hadn’t heard it. She took offense. She took offense ‘mightily.’” With his Tennessee accent, he gave to the word a deep oratorical roll. This was her friend Chad, whose last name she couldn’t remember, so she called him Chad the Volunteer. “And Saltonberg told her she was proving his thesis for him, like any good American she was defending her ignorance, and he asked her if she would mind standing as his example. You didn’t see her come storming out?”
“Wanna get something to eat?” Annie said.
They crossed back over the gorge to Collegetown. She had a bagel with cream cheese and a carton of some juice mixture. While she ate, she got Chad to tell her about his town, Murfreesboro, and about his family. His father sold Buicks in town and had had the foresight to grab the Honda franchise when that was tantamount to desecrating the American flag. Thanks to Hondas—who bought Buicks anymore?—Chad was able to get out of town and come to this elite spot. Laughter. No sisters? No, a spoiled little brother and the mother who spoiled him. Scandals? Not really. A cousin who was gay. During a summer visit he’d come on to Chad, and Chad had let him. Really? Yeah, Chad had always liked him, and to be frank, he wasn’t exactly sure what it was they did. A single laugh. Really? No shit? Chad was young at the time. He was young now. Blow job, what did it mean? She sized him up. He was smart, clear-eyed, a face of such balanced proportions it’d be easy to draw, a shock of light brown hair on his forehead, unhidden, she decided. To top it off, a voice from home. Did he like it? He was amazed to see his cousin rooting down there, too amazed to get hard, much less to come.
And she was amazed to hear him go on like this. Southern boys didn’t talk about sex as freely as Northern boys did. She had her mouth open on a single soundless laugh. “Wild,” she said, and discovered she had put her hand on his leg under the table. When had she done that? And when had she reached up high enough to feel him go hard down a pants leg? But that was where she found her hand. Amazing. As if she were rewarding the loyalty of the family dog, she patted him there. Thanks for cutting a class. For coming to lunch with her. For telling her his stories. Out on the street, he wanted to take her to his apartment, which wasn’t far away. She followed him there. She’d begun to feel ghosted and guided by
