I was also twelve, and starting junior high, so I wanted to look as pretty as possible the next day. If I attracted a boyfriend, I thought, maybe he would distract me from everything else, the way Angela was distracted by the very idea of dating. My little grid of accessories thus included purple eye shadow. It was a pale, frosty shade that my mother had given me after I’d begged, and then taught me to dust almost invisibly on my lids.
As Tootsie’s sharp eyes surveyed the items on the trunk, I saw my compulsive precision through her eyes and immediately flushed with embarrassment. I was still awash in this feeling when she reached down, picked up the eye shadow, and said in a low, derisive voice, “You don’t want to look like a whore, do you?”
My response was nothing worth remembering, a passive, shocked mumble. Tootsie put the eye shadow back down, but the message was clear: I was not to wear it. It was useless now, a shameful, secret thing. I remembered then how strange Tootsie had seemed to me that night she visited me and Mom in Maine, strong and direct and plain. She’d worn red cotton sweatpants, tapered at the ankles above chunky white sneakers, topped by a gray T-shirt that said ARMY in block print across the chest. The shirt was tucked into the waistband of her pants, and the bright white drawstring was tamed in a tight knot near the fabric. It was hard to believe that she and my mother were sisters, and I watched carefully when they laughed together, Mom’s melodic giggles dancing over Tootsie’s masculine rumble. That night in Texas, I sensed that Tootsie’s comment was a condemnation of the kind of woman my mother had been, someone foolish enough to care about looking pretty, someone girly. But I couldn’t stand to think about this, to face that living in a house where Mom’s form of beauty wasn’t valued was to begin the process of her erasure.
But that night Tootsie insisted I sleep with the light off, leaving no room for argument. And so I gradually relearned that darkness could be a comfort, too.
* * *
Tootsie’s moods were volatile, her desires a moving target I could rarely hit. She had very rigid ideas about how a person should behave, ideas she usually shared with me only after I had done something to displease her. It is hard, now, to recall examples of what could make her angry; the system of rules was constantly changing, the triggers unpredictable and confusing. I was a relatively good preteen and teenager: I dressed neatly, studied, did not smoke or drink or stay out late. But the smallest infraction could make her explode, yelling until her face turned red, shaking and waving her finger inches from my eyes. I wasn’t used to this; this was the sort of fighting I’d only observed, or heard through my bedroom wall. Worse than the yelling, though, was the way she could coldly intone just one sentence and convince me that I wasn’t just misbehaving, but inherently bad—silly and ungrateful and weak.
Above all else, Tootsie despised weakness. As the family story goes, she was always hardest on Gwen, her infuriatingly sensitive, quiet, slow little sister. She often repeated her mantra that those who couldn’t run a mile, regardless of the reason, were useless. She believed only the strong deserved to live. I wanted to be one of the strong.
Tootsie would go on two-mile runs, timing herself to ensure that she made it in twenty minutes or less, ever mindful, at nearly forty, of keeping up with her eighteen-year-old recruits. She would return red and sweaty from the ninety-degree heat, startlingly soon after her departure, and I was always struck by the idea that if it took that much exertion for her, such a run would be impossible for me. My thinness was from not eating, not from exercise. I had knobby elbows and indented temples; I got winded easily. It occurs to me now that Tootsie could have taken me with her on slower runs, shared training tips and built me up. She could have taught me that strength can be earned and quietly built, not just summoned with a desperate, all-or-nothing force of will.
Tootsie’s training as an Army recruiter had taught her to identify weakness and manipulate it, a skill I too often fell prey to. Sometimes when I really did break the rules, she would be shockingly lenient. This disturbed me more than anything else; after enough explosions and judgments, those calm and reasonable responses started to feel like a ploy. I felt real physical fear at the idea of displeasing her. Each time I came home from seeing Angela next door, I scanned the atmosphere of the house, tasted the air to see if Tootsie was wound up, my body tense, my heart speeding until I reached the safety of my room.
Homework was my best excuse to hole up, since the only thing Tootsie and I really agreed on was that I could always work harder. I’d bring home report cards filled with 97s and 98s and Tootsie would ask why, if it was all so easy for me, those grades weren’t 100s. If this comment was meant to be a joke, it was impossible at the time to differentiate it from her often outlandish criticism. I did not allow myself to think about how my mother would never have said such a thing, and tried not to dwell on my conviction that Tootsie wouldn’t speak to her sons that way. I told myself that I needed a place to live, period. And I was not interested in replacing my mother.
* * *
About four months into my life in Texas, I came home from school on a Wednesday afternoon, exhausted from sleep deprivation and the effort of speaking and moving and smiling like a normal teenager, from answering questions in class and listening to my classmates talk endlessly about crushes and movies and unfair parents and skateboards and their hair. I set my heavy backpack down in my room and noticed the silence in the carpeted house. I walked the length of it to the garage, which I found blissfully empty.
I walked back through the house toward the bathroom, pausing for a moment to stare out the glass doors. My eyes traced the flat line of the canal along the horizon, just above the shallow-pitched roofs of the neighbors’ houses. The sky was white with heat, even this late in the year.