Sara Lippmann writes sharp prose that rewards the reader’s close attention. This weekend’s story is no exception. Here we have two sisters cooking and talking around their relationships with men, one man in particular. Sometimes our conversations are more about what we keep to ourselves. —Matt Salesses, Good Men Project Fiction Editor
♦◊♦
We’re finishing up a test run of a recipe my sister found in an old Martha Stewart before she prepares it for the new guy she’s dating. The dish is straightforward. We have preheated the oven, pricked the skin to allow steam to escape, baked the squash for an hour, until their bodies began to soften and cave, then pulled them out to cool on the counter before halving. I grab a plastic colander, steer it toward Allison with my elbow. Her nose twitches, an itch she can’t scratch, her fists in steaming wells of spaghetti squash.
“There’s so much,” she says.
“Here,” I say.
Golden bits dot her wrists. As kids, our neighbors tricked out their house every Halloween, and we’d shuffle through it, two in the hoard of blindfolded children shoving hands through plates: cold noodle brains, hearts of raw meat. Afterward, I’d have nightmares.
Now we separate the slime from the seeds. I rinse them off in the blue colander, pat dry.
“Keep the oven on,” I say.
“Thought you could only roast pumpkin,” she says.
“So we’ll call them pumpkin,” I say, shaking the seeds onto a tray. “With olive oil and salt, who will know the difference?”
Our kids are too busy killing each other in the basement to eat. Dodge ball becomes wrestling becomes secret ninja attacks.
Allison directs her attention to my kitchen mat – orange, cheerful, spongy – beneath our bare feet. “Memory foam?”
“It’s new, ergonomically designed -”
“Shock absorbing.” She finishes my sentence. I nod. We rock back and forth, toes spread – hers dark, mine pale, both painted – bouncing slightly.
I wipe my hands on a dishtowel hand-stitched with roosters and baby pigs. Since we moved to White Plains I am defenseless to the flurry of department store coupons.
“Do people even make squash anymore?”
I give the seeds a last toss, like I’m panning for gold, before shutting them into the oven.
“People make everything,” I tell her. I mostly make frozen entrees.
But she’s not asking, she’s saying.
“How can you go wrong with butter and cinnamon sugar?” I say.
She takes a fork to the pulp and starts scraping. This is the fun part: The flesh shreds right into strands.
I want to be encouraging. I say, “It’s working.” But her lip is quivering.
Eddie said partly why he left was her goddamn nerves. Always two breaths from a panic attack, blubbering or ecstatic or moping. “Bo-ring,” Eddie drawled like the big baby he is. “I’m completely bummed out,” he said, puffed into his empty beer. He calls me dude but that’s only part of it.
I grab a clean bowl for our nest of threads.
Allison read somewhere, one of her magazines, that we accumulate 90% of what’s ours, that is, what shapes us, memories and experience, the in-between—by the time we are 17.
I’ve told her she has plenty of runway left. I overheard the phrase in line at the mall but she can’t let the thought go. Then the rest of our years are spent pining for what, exactly?
“What if he thinks it’s a dumb idea?” she sniffs, meaning the boyfriend. He’s from the Internet where people say anything, except Allison. Already she’s calling him Mr. Man.
Sometimes I wish I could be like her, feeling everything simultaneously, the full spectrum right there on the surface. Every kiss, every fender bender, forgotten line in a school play, every insult from our mother, touch from our father, every exhilaration and humiliation, fingers slammed in lockers, stretching me out like a mouse in a trap, all of it.
But how is that useful? Ours was an easy, well-balanced childhood. We attended good schools and met future husbands. We did! And did!
♦◊♦
There is one item I have not mentioned. Eddie and me . . . before they married.
God, that’s a lie.
Three times but who is counting. Fucking is hardly ever memorable. I am her little sister. Isn’t that how it goes? The older taller more pleasant-looking sister for the long haul, but the young one, plump and juicy, to taste.
Whenever I visited her in college, I wound up with him. Heavy-lidded Eddie. He smelled like fried shrimp but that didn’t matter. If you have no expectations it is impossible to be disappointed.
Somehow, my sister still maintains standards for people.
I want to grab her by the shoulders and shout, “Snap out of it!”
But she’s my sister. I love her. There are hand-me-downs between us.
♦◊♦
I have kids and she has kids and Eddie and Jim always took a guys’ trip out West skiing every winter. In a divorce the family is supposed to take sides, but Eddie still comes around. Last Thursday he stopped by for a bourbon and took me in the laundry room when Jim ducked out for ice. It is sad, though, in a way, what’s become of us.
If you aren’t careful to compartmentalize, life can compile.
Eddie is not the only one who says: Dude, you are a machine, but he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
♦◊♦
Now there’s something in my eye. A fleck of pulp, maybe.
“Can you get it?” I ask. Allison puts down her cinnamon and stands real close. Her mascara is smudged into a compass. I blink like a lunatic but she can’t see anything.
“Flush,” she suggests, calmly, brightening, as she recalls tenth grade chemistry, the eyewash case attached to the wall lest someone spill hydrochloric acid.
I try to produce tears but none are coming.
“It’s like a foreign body.”
She tells me: “Don’t panic.”
She says, “Maybe it’s a gnat,” to be helpful. “They can be almost microscopic.” There is a breach in the kitchen screen, but it’s not spring. It’s barely March.
Canadian geese pick over the parched field adjacent to the house. Four cardinals sit like girls without stockings in the kitchen window hoping for a change in seasons.
Even when everything goes according to plan there is a disconnect between how things are and how they look on paper. Trying to bridge that gap, maybe that’s where we went wrong.
Why must we dump on our mother? She had her run of fun, fresh out of school at 16 because it was fashionable then, to be young and ahead rather than old and behind like now, where every other child is detained for advantage, so that seven-year-old goliaths dominate the kindergarten, our kids no exception. We all play the same exact game.
My sister stirs her bowl. Downstairs someone howls. Whoever’s child it is, hers or mine, recovers quickly.
“Has Jim heard from Eddie?” Allison pushes her wisps with the back of her hand. They are new and highlighted and meant to be youthful. “Oh God, forget I asked.”
I rub my eye.
“Did you ever believe we’d end up here?” she says. “On the glue farm.”
The oven beeps. Our seeds are done.
“He’s going to love it,” I tell her. She twirls her fork around the squash glistening with butter, dotted in spice, silky as a doll’s hair. She holds a bite up and blows. Its translucency a dead giveaway that it will be nothing like real spaghetti.
“You first,” she says. “Taste.”
I open my mouth and my sister feeds me.
“He’s going to love you,” I moan.
Fear is terrible, a paralyzing thing.
–photo Flickr/semarr