“I need coffee,” says Penny. But she climbs into Rosemary’s bunk with me.
I know she doesn’t want to talk about our sister. About our feelings. She never does. She’ll lash out if you push her, so I stay silent.
Penny puts her feet in the air, still in the lamb slippers. They touch the ceiling.
I put my feet in the air, too, in blue scrunchy socks.
We wiggle our toes on the ceiling together.
“Would you want to go hunt in the attic?” I ask, getting an idea. “Just to look for maybe some of the old books? And maybe games? We might want them.” I don’t mention Rosemary’s other things, her clothes and stuffed lions and so on.
“I wouldn’t say no to a game of Clue.”
“Also those Diana Wynne Jones books,” I say.
“Those are sweet,” says Penny. “I could do a reread of some of those babies, for sure.”
* * *
—
WE PAD UPSTAIRS to my parents’ floor. At the end of the hall is a doorway to a narrow wooden staircase. That goes up to our attic space—the turret. It is a hexagonal room with two windows and a finished wooden floor, but it tends to be stuffy and hot, so Tipper uses it for storage.
The room smells of wood and dust. There are a couple of carpets, in rolls. Trunks and cardboard containers are carefully labeled in our mother’s handwriting. As I expected, there’s a cluster of new-looking boxes against one wall, neatly taped.
Penny and I spend the next half hour looking through the contents. I say hello to Shampoo and the other stuffed lions, to Rosemary’s shorts and T-shirts. Oh, I miss her. But I want to keep Penny with me, so I close those boxes quickly. Instead, I focus on games. We find Clue, Scrabble, and the Magic 8 Ball. Do we want the Spirograph art thing? No.
Penny shakes the 8 Ball while I rummage some more. “Will I fall in love?” she asks it.
Better not to tell you now, it says.
“Will I at least make out with someone? This summer? Anyone?”
Reply hazy. Try again.
“Ugh. Will there be kissing?” she asks, exasperated.
Signs point to yes.
“That’s more like it,” Penny says.
Boys have lined up for her attention ever since she started at North Forest, but Penny claims that she was never in love with any of them. “Some were extremely cute,” she told me once. “But they were too stupid to love.”
It seems unfair that this magnetism and beauty should be so heavily gifted to Penny, as if by some fairies at her birth, and that she should value it so little. She has kissed too many people to keep count, is asked early to every dance, is never alone unless she wants to be. She is valued for the good fortune of her cheekbones, the blue of her eyes, the extra length of her neck. And she has never known any other way of being in the world.
“Will Carrie fall in love?” she asks the 8 Ball.
As I see it, yes.
“Ooh, Carrie, you’re falling in love.”
“It didn’t say when,” I remind Penny. “I might be falling in love when I am thirty.”
“Will Carrie fall in love this summer?” Penny asks the 8 Ball.
It is certain.
“There’s no one to fall in love with,” I tell the ball. “There’s not anyone for Penny to kiss, either.”
She sighs. “That’s true.”
We do not know the boys are coming then. We don’t know how they will spin us around, rile us; change our conceptions of ourselves and upend our lives like drunken gods playing with the fates of mortals.
But we are both in the mood to be upended.
Penny goes on asking the ball ridiculous questions. “Will I ever memorize the periodic table?” “Will I marry Simon Le Bon?” He is the lead singer of a band she likes. “Is Bess the biggest pill on earth or are there bigger pills in existence?” “Will Wharton overcome her fear of seagulls?”
We take Clue, Scrabble, and a backgammon set for ourselves, plus some worn Wynne Jones novels. Last, we open a box of Rosemary’s fairy-tale books. Many of them are old, having belonged to my father when he was young, and to his mother before that. They are grand, their pictures deep with mystery. Curlicue letters begin their chapters. These are the books I used to read to Rosemary before she went to bed.
“Mother used to read those to me and Bess,” says Penny, touching the fairy book on the top of the stack. “But I don’t remember Rosemary having them.”
“She did.”
“I hope they didn’t scare her. Some of them are pretty bloody.”
“She was never scared of stories.”
I take the books to my room. Then Penny and I go downstairs, where Tipper has made fresh carrot muffins studded with raisins, coconut, and walnuts. We drink mugs of milky coffee and eat hot muffins on the porch, where the air is warming in the sun.
I beat Penny at Scrabble.
10.
“CARRIE,” BESS CALLS from the sand as I walk onto the Big Beach. “We need you.”
My sisters say this all the time. They say it because I am the eldest. In this case, they need me to set up the umbrella, a large white contraption with a persnickety mechanism—but it began with “We need you” to tie our shoes. That became “We need you” to play mermaids with us, became “We need you” to cut out paper dolls, became “We need you” to tell the nanny we didn’t mean to paint the dining table.
More recently, it evolved into “We need you” to show us how to shave our legs, to help Bess write a paper, to get Penny reinstated on the tennis team when she’s missed so many practices. To help Penny pack when she’s left it till the last minute, to convince Tipper to let Bess have a low-cut dress she wants, to redirect the gossip that swarms around school now that Penny’s dumped Lachlan two weeks before the end of term. “We need you” means my sisters love me, they rely on me, they admire me.
After I set up the umbrella, the three of us spend the middle of the day stretched out beneath it. Our parents come for shorter periods, and Gerrard takes a dip during his break, but my sisters and I have set up camp. Two printed cotton blankets are laid end to end. The umbrella gives us shade. We have strawberries, blackberries, ham-and-Brie sandwiches on baguettes, and thin buttery cookies. A cooler of drinks. We have a pile of magazines and a boom box we only play when our mother isn’t around. She hates music on the beach.
We listen to cassettes: Terence Trent D’Arby, Pet Shop Boys, R.E.M., Duran Duran. We lie on our backs and dance by waving our legs and arms in the air.
When we swim, we do it together. We don’t speak about it, but none of us ever swims alone.
“Tipper has a secret photograph hidden in her jewelry drawer,” I tell my sisters as we flop onto the blankets, dripping and breathing hard. I didn’t intend to blurt what’s on my mind, but it pops out.
Bess’s eyes widen. “What of?”
“I didn’t see it,” I say. “Only the corner. She shoved it underneath so I wouldn’t see.”
“It’s probably Rosemary,” says Penny.
“She would let me see Rosemary. I asked if it was Rosemary.”
“Maybe not. If she thought it would make you sad.”
“Maybe it’s Uncle Chris,” says Bess. My mother’s brother, Christopher Taft, ran away to South America with a woman quite a bit older than he. That is all I know about him. None of us kids have ever met him, and as far as I know, Tipper never hears from him. Her parents “washed their hands of Chris”—that’s what our late Granny M used to say.
“Oh, yeah, Christopher,” says Penny. “Should we go peek at it?”
“Ooh, yes,” says Bess.
“We can’t go prying in her stuff.” I am suddenly worried they’ll run upstairs and dig out the photograph, leaving a trail of sand and making a mess of our mother’s jewelry drawer.
“She shouldn’t be keeping things from us,” says Bess, pouting. “We deserve to see all her pictures.”
“Come on,” Penny says to me. “You wouldn’t have told us if you weren’t curious.”
“We could sneak in when she’s busy in the garden,” adds Bess. “You could be the lookout while Penny and I steal the photo.”
“No,” I say sharply. I don’t want them upsetting our parents. “What if it’s her and Harris naked?”
“Oh, blech. No.” Penny sticks out her tongue.