MiPOesias Magazine

LISA GABRIELE

Lisa Gabriele is a novelist and journalist, and her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Vice Magazine, Salon, Glamour, among other publications, and she's a regular contributor to
Nerve.com. Her first novel is called Tempting Faith DiNapoli and it was published by Simon and Schuster, Doubleday Canada and Virago, UK. Her second novel, from which this excerpt was taken, will be published in the fall of 2007, tentatively titled All My Darling Sidekicks. She's also directed and produced several documentaries for CBC TV, History Channel and Life Network. She writes the CBC radio program, The Current. She lives in Toronto.

All My Darling Sidekicks
(working title)

I was never jealous of the few women Lou brought around, who marveled at our complicated house, with all its shacks and sheds and big airy rooms; marveled at these motherless girls before them. But it did look decorated by lonely people; too many pictures of us hung on too many walls; flowers either plucked or constructed by tissue deserved every living vase. Our artwork since kindergarten suffocated the fridge and doors, yellowing in perpetuity. But these women's urge to blend their needy lives into our motherless ones was sometimes powerfully palpable to Beth. Oh, you poor thing, their eyes would say to her. Got no mom to clean this big old house with two bathrooms, garage, carport, mortgage fully paid for, no doubt, by the good job your good dad seems to have no problem holding down in this blue-collar town full of divorced drunks, deadbeat fathers and unemployed jerks. And we knew if they reached for Beth’s cheek or her hair with that look on their faces, their coats would mysteriously appear strung between Lou's fingers. This was followed by a quick ride home to their rentals over beauty parlors, or wherever they shared space with their own brats, or lazy roommates, both of us watching them from the passenger seat, because we always made them take the backseat. I’d turn and wave weakly while Lou pulled fast away. Another one bites the dust, Beth would say, shrugging, and it would be just us for a great long stretch.
When it came to parenting alone, it’s not that Lou didn’t try hard, it’s just he didn’t really know what to try hard for. And we were very little help. How’s a kid to know what extra things were needed when most of the main ones were always nearly met? We had food on the table, take-out mostly, which was the envy of friends departing to dull meatloaves and bland casseroles. We had a roof over our heads, though the house remained perpetually unfinished. Lou was the kind of man who always needed projects and a series of small rooms in which to work, huddled over various power tools until well into the night. He built the woodshed, the storage shed, and the small room attached to the carport where he kept restaurant-supply-sized condiments. Giant cans of ketchup, relish, mustard, pickled eggs, and soup lined the saggy shelves. “Fell off the back of my truck,” Lou said, by way of describing his grocery shopping forays.
Five years after Nell died, Lou briefly dated the social worker from the agency that handled Beth’s formal adoption. Amy Landau was thirty-nine, elderly in our books, but she dressed just like a giant baby. She wore tight pastel sweatshirts decorated with cartoons under which appeared slogans such as, Jesus made my day, on the back, HE made yours too! She was a woman so opposite to Nell in every category, Beth hated Amy instantly. But Amy was kind to Lou and her roundness appealed to me. I liked the feeling of her fingers putting hair behind my ears, though I tried not to let Beth see me smile at these gestures, faking all my flinchings.
Amy often offered to baby-sit us, even though at thirteen and ten, Beth was old enough to baby-sit me. But leaving us alone made Lou nervous. So when his truck broke down near Ann Arbor, an overnight repair, he called Amy.
We bounded off the bus and there she was sitting the kitchen, as smug as a chubby hen.
“Hi there yous two. Your dad’s gonna be away tonight. His truck broke down. So I’m frying up a chicken and making mashed and corn bread.”
The kitchen counter was piled high with the carnage of terrific effort. It was like Amy was trying to dig her way into the centre of the house using our mother’s copper pots and spatulas as her implements. We hadn’t used the cookie sheets and cake mixers since she’d died, and seeing them askew in the sink, dirtied and used, stilled Beth darkly. Those things were so precious and so yesterday, to us. And though Beth and I did not have a secret sister language, I could feel the onset of her bad weather.
Without a word, we sat down at the table.
“Well, how was your day?” Amy asked.
“Fine,” Beth said. I said nothing.
“So…why don’t you both sit tight, and I’ll have dinner in a minute.”
Amy tried desperately to give off a whiff of efficiency, and worked the kitchen like she had four arms and four legs, scooping and layering and piling the food onto Nana Beecher’s good plates, another galling thing that kicked hard at Beth’s insides. When Amy landed the plates smoothly in front of Beth she treated her fork like a scalpel and began nudging at the chicken like she was performing a delicate operation. I kept my eyes on Beth, hands to my side.
“Peachy, honey, why don’t you try it. Like your sister.”
Beth looked at Amy as though astonished she’d been sitting there all that time.
“Why do you want to marry Lou?” she asked.
“Why my God. I don’t want such a thing at all. Why are you speaking like that, Beth?” She giggled uncomfortably, and moved her hair off her face.
“You’re going to be fat one day,” Beth added.
“Please take that back,” Amy whispered.
“Do you want to get married to Lou or what?” Beth asked.
“I do not. Now please eat, Beth,” Amy said, adding in a much lower octave, “I would like to get married one day. What girl doesn’t?”
“I don’t.” Beth said, scooping up mashed potatoes and holding the pile like she was going to throw it.
“Why not? Marriage is beautiful. Don’t you want to be a bride some day? I’m sure your sister does.”
I looked at Beth for how to be, but she forgot I was there. Her mind was on breaking Amy.
“Why do you want to marry Lou?” Beth repeated.
“Beth! Jesus! That’s just not a question I can answer. My goodness. Maybe you should shut that thing.” Amy pointed to her own mouth then reached for a cigarette and lit it. She looked rattled and precocious. “Let’s talk about you two,” she said, blowing the smoke ceiling ward. “Let’s talk about your days. Peachy how was school?”
“Good,” I kept my eyes on Beth.
“Well, I don’t want to marry your father anyway,” Amy said, ignoring my answer. “We’re only just friends. Mostly for your sakes because we’re worried about yous both.”
Smoke came out of her nose like a dragon.
“That’s dumb. You don’t need to be worried about us,” Beth said.
“We’ll we are.”
“That’s dumb. You don’t have to be worried. And don’t say ‘we’,” Beth said, louder.
“It’s called concern. You girls had a hard time dealing with your mom's death. And all the adjustments with your situation, Beth, and well, my assessment is that you two are not okay, and you both need to get adjusted to the fact that you don’t have a mom. Plus you need to grow up a little, Beth. You’re too old to be attached to your daddy such as you are.”
This wasn’t Beth's war and she wasn’t going to lose.
“Well my assessment is you’re a twit,” she said, “and you need to stop coming around here so much anymore. Lou thinks so too because he says your stupid smoking is making tobacco executives in Kentucky rich so that they can drive Cadillacs and send their kids to Harvard Business School. Besides, how can I be attached to a daddy who died? Lou isn’t my daddy, he’s hers,” Beth said, pointing her butter knife at me.
Amy took in Beth like an adult adversary. After she poked her cigarette dead in the ashtray, she stomped out of the kitchen, returning only to snatch her purse. She pointed her finger into the Beth’s face.
“I’ll be telling your daddy about this,” she hissed into Beth’s face.
“I told you, he’s not my daddy.” It was the first time I thought of us as half sisters, as having a diminished relationship, a lesser sense of love between us. “He’s only my temporary caregiver until I am eighteen. Then I can go back to where I was born and take care of myself.”
“Well if you keep that attitude up, missy—“ she said, not finishing her awful thought. At Children’s Aid, where I had worked for five years, I had known social workers like Amy, those who would insinuated themselves into their clients’ troubled lives, sometimes falling in love with men they’d think they could cleanse and change, or they’d befriend the shattered women, next to whom they could remain forever superior.
We quietly listened to the sound of Amy’s crappy Corolla grumbling alive, and pulling out of the gravel driveway. Then we attacked her chicken like a couple of jackals.
“This is damn good chicken,” Beth said, mimicking Lou’s Texas lilt, piling a little pyre for the barn cats who’d been relocated to the shed after the barn was dismantled for firewood.
“Damn good,” I said. But part of me felt sullen and afraid. Beth was becoming the only female constant in the house, something she’d become talented at maintaining.
When we got home from school the next day, we found Lou napping upright in the dark living room. Beth heard his rattly snore and turned on his lamp by his chair. There was a picture of Nell we kept on the table. She had a wide, high forehead. In it she’s looking over a shoulder at a camera while sitting on the corner of a sofa, not one we’d ever seen. There were four other pictures of her that we knew by heart. The wedding photo from Atlanta was on the shelf in the living room. She wore the same unsmiling face, looking at Lou with steely hope. Lou's bearded, grinning widely, his then-dark hair pulled back into his perennial ponytail. There was a picture of Nell and a beagle she briefly took care of in San Francisco. Lou kept that one in his wallet, pulling it out every time one of us would do something with our hands or faces that reminded Lou of Nell.
“Jeez, Bethie you do the same thing with your eyebrows your mom did.”
Fewer things made Beth happier than to hear Lou form those connections. “What else do I do like her?” Beth’d ask.
“You cry like her. Same things make you mad. When you can’t get your way, or can’t understand how to do something. The way you put your fist on your forehead to knock an idea loose. Stuff like that.”
“What else?” she’d ask.
“Well, you also ask too many questions.”
“What else?”
“You sure know how to chase away women around here,” he said. “Heard about that Amy business. I don’t want to hear your side of the story, but I was right angry to know yall were alone last night.”
“I can take care of her,” Beth said, pointing at me.
“Yeah, but who’s gonna take care of you?”
“Me.”
Her favorite was the picture of Nell pregnant with Beth. In it, Nell’s laying on her back on a beach, Santa Cruz scribbled on the back. She’s wearing a black maillot, shielding her eyes from the sun. She’s smirking, one arm behind her head, the other making the number three, which was the amount of months Beth had been growing inside of her. Beth kept that picture in her kitchen in New York. When she drank too much, which was more often, she’d call me late. At the end of one of those one-sided conversations, after Beth stopped running on about some relationship gone to shit, or a new philosophy she’d adopted had proved futile, she told me she was looking at that picture.
I felt gentle when I asked, “What do you remember about mom?”
Beth breathed in and out. I could hear the sound of her bottle meeting glass.
“She always had gum,” she said.

To be published by Simon and Schuster, 2007