Ms. Hempel Chronicles

Satellite

MS. HEMPEL HAD A WAY with girls of a certain age. They hung around her after school; they invited her over to their houses for dinner. They sent notes at the end of the year, usually on cards they had drawn themselves. Serpentine flowers. Primitive stars. On overnight trips they asked if they could play with her hair. They showed her their poems, sought advice about boys. At Christmas they gave her poinsettias and a gift certificate for a back massage. They liked her shoes, her clothes; they liked every time she did something different with her hair. Not once did they miss her birthday. On the last day of school, they hugged her, speechlessly. But later she would read, in their purple handwriting: I’ll always remember the seventh grade.

Her sister, Maggie, found all of this difficult to believe. “I would never do that for a teacher,” she declared. “Is your school a hippie school?” She wanted to know if they had to do gym. “Can they call you Beatrice?” She narrowed her eyes. “Do they get real grades?”

“Of course they do!” Beatrice said, and snatched the birthday card back from her sister. “I failed a kid two years ago.”

Maggie returned to her puzzle book, spread out on the kitchen table. She resumed chewing the beleaguered eraser at the end of her pencil. Rotating her ankle, she kneaded her long monkey toes against the floor.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Your students sound weird.”

According to whom! But Beatrice contained herself. She gazed at her sister — the shiny, pebbled dome of her forehead, the butterfly appliqués on her mall-bought top, the chapped knuckles of her long, desiccated fingers — and thought to herself, without much pleasure, My students would eat you for breakfast.

Did Maggie even know what it meant to shape an eyebrow? To do an ollie? Would she say tuna sashimi was her favorite food ever? Would she choose Elie Wiesel as the subject for her next book report?

Probably not. She wasn’t in any hurry to become a knowing, complicated member of the world. She was content to do puzzles and enter flute competitions and behave ingratiatingly with their mother. Often Beatrice had to remind herself that her sister was the same age as the girls she taught at school. Compared to them, Maggie seemed either stunted or strangely wizened.

“No tea for me,” she said, though Beatrice hadn’t asked. She poured the boiling water into a cup and opened the refrigerator.

“Where’s the milk?”

“You’ll have to use soy,” Maggie said. “Turns out I’m lactose intolerant.”

“But we love milk,” said Beatrice. “We love all dairy products.”

“Remember last summer? The banana split?”

Beatrice nodded, haunted not by the explosive sounds em-anating from the bathroom but by the hoarse moans coming from what must have been her sister. She had sounded like an old sinner on his deathbed.

“Well, that was the problem,” Maggie said.

Beatrice shook the little box of liquid soy. She shook and shook, but didn’t have any plans to open it. “Mama puts this in her coffee?”

“Mama didn’t even drink her first glass of milk,” Maggie crowed, “until she was seven years old!” No wonder she looked so pleased with her deficiency. Once upon a time, there was no such thing as milk in China! She could have stepped right out of the mythical rice fields herself. Not like Beatrice, or their brother Calvin: those shaggy, beetle-browed, milk-drinking mutts. Maggie’s hair was straight and black, her limbs as dreamily smooth as their mother’s — as if she had managed to run the gestational gauntlet unscathed by their father’s messy genes. That mysterious soup, full of slashes: German/Scottish/Welsh/Irish/French. Really, French? Or was that just a wishful affectation? No one knew anymore, no one cared; so why not be a tiny bit French and marvel at Maggie’s quality of chinoiserie. She was not quite the real deal, although she looked pretty close. So much like her mother, people said of Maggie, a similarity that Beatrice had never been accused of.

“Did Mama tell you?” Maggie said. “You’re supposed to be helping me with my application essay.”

“It’s my birthday!” Beatrice said.

She was supposed to be eating noodles for longevity and then maybe some cake for sheer sugary happiness. (But cake with a tall, cold glass of soy?) She was supposed to be blowing out candles and making wishes and being waited upon by her mother. Sleeping late in her narrow bed, reading her old Madeleine L’Engle books, flipping through her record collection in the closet. Why not come home? Her mother’s invitation on the phone had been seductive. Why not come home and relax?

“I don’t know my teachers’ birthdays,” Maggie said musingly. “So I couldn’t give them a card even if I wanted to.” She looked with new curiosity at Beatrice. “How do your students know when your birthday is?”

Beatrice lifted her hands in self-defense. “It comes up naturally in conversation!” she cried.

MAGGIE HAD BEEN, FROM the very first, a surprise. When they found out her mother was pregnant, Beatrice’s father had already taken up residence in a clammy carriage house a few blocks away, basically living in someone else’s backyard. It was only a trial separation, he said. He took with him six shirts, his English shaving kit, and a book of tormented divorce poems by Derek Walcott. Beatrice and Calvin would visit him on the weekends, playing cards on the Murphy bed while he cooked them cheese sandwiches in a toaster oven. Then their mother changed her mind, and he moved back home. With miraculous speed he finished building the gazebo that had been languishing for months. They switched therapists; they spent a weekend at an outdoor early-music festival; he bought her some extravagant chandelier earrings, and when she told him she didn’t like them, he failed to act insulted. A delicate truce was established, into which Maggie was born.

“She’s the caboose!” people said, which seemed a very lighthearted way of referring to an accident of such human proportions. At the time Beatrice couldn’t bear to contemplate how such an accident might have occurred. Only many years later did she realize that her sister sprang from a final good-bye — the product of one last, sad, habitual bout of affection — an insight that occurred while she herself was thus occupied, though in her case she remembered to wear a diaphragm.

Maggie’s birth coincided with the release of a new Sonic Youth record called Sister. Beatrice went to the all-ages show they played on a Sunday afternoon and bought a T-shirt with a picture of a half-naked punk rock girl crawling along the floor and staring alluringly, or maybe crazily, at the camera. She was naked from the waist down, not on top. It was hard to tell, but it looked like she had carved some words into her leg with a razor or a pocketknife. Beatrice knew from reading the back of the album that this picture was a film still, and that the film was called Submit to Me, but she couldn’t find the information she wanted most, which was where one could see a film like this.

At home she pointed to her chest, saying, “Look!” The shirt said sister, and was a tribute to the baby. Maybe because the silk screen wasn’t very clear, no one seemed to notice that the crawling girl didn’t have on any underwear, and Beatrice was able to sport her shirt everywhere, even to school. She wore it until it became as thin and soft as a little kid’s nightgown. Then she kept on wearing it until a hole opened up beneath the armpit and another one at the neckline, and then until it completely fell apart. Thinking ahead, she kept the remains; she had a feeling they’d be of historical interest and value, and maybe, like a Civil War uniform, good material for a quilt.

“THERE IS NO GREATER JOY than seeing the fruit of your labor shining on the stage.” So read the final sentence of Maggie’s essay, a sentence that Beatrice feared would not immediately identify her sister as a gifted or talented youth. Maggie was applying to a special summer program, and she needed to get in. Once she finished the eighth grade, she wouldn’t be ushered onto the ancient, rolling campus where Beatrice and Calvin had spent their adolescence. She’d be going to a real high school instead, with tracked classes and a chain-link fence. Hence the grim work of supplementing her soon-to-be-public education had begun.

“Okay, let’s take a step back,” said Beatrice. “What are you trying to say in this essay? What do you want to communicate to the reader?”

“That I like being a theater tech,” said Maggie.

“Okay, good. So what about it do you like?”

“I like getting to use the electric drill. Also, Mr. Minkoff showed me how to work the circuit breaker.” She thought for a moment. “We can go to the cast party afterwards if we want.”

“Great. Those are really great specifics. Write those down.” Beatrice felt clearheaded, competent. Nearly professional. But she couldn’t get over the feeling that she was performing for a tiny hidden camera feeding directly into her mother’s busy control room. “Now let’s think a little broader. Be a little more abstract. What are the big reasons you’re drawn to doing this? What do you get out of the experience?”

“Like, emotionally?” Maggie asked, full of sincerity, far more tractable as a pupil than she ever was as a sibling. “I get good self-esteem. Is that what you mean? And cooperation and problem solving and self-respect.” Looking at her final sentence, she added neatly: “Joy. A lot of joy.”

Beatrice took a breath. “All of those reasons are certainly broad.” She glanced down at the notebook page on which her sister was steadfastly transcribing her ideas. The clichés, nothing if not resilient, were massing once again; perhaps a more drastic approach was required. “Now let’s try going deeper, too. Let’s try finding some darkness, some interesting conflict.”

“Conflict like how?” Maggie asked. “You mean fights backstage?”

“Well, that’s one sort, but I was thinking of the more internal kind.”

Beatrice deliberated, but only briefly, then raised an unseen hand and placed it over the tiny hidden camera.

“And by internal, I mean the conflict you feel as a theater tech. The inner conflict. Doing all that hard work, but never really getting recognized. Not getting the appreciation you deserve. Having to stay in the wings the whole time.”

Maggie had stopped writing, but she was still gazing at the half-filled page, as if she had found a menacing pattern there.

Beatrice’s voice rose slightly. “Who spends all those hours painting and hammering and sawing? You do! But do you get to come out and take a bow? Do you get the applause?”

Maggie looked up. “At the curtain call, the actors point to us and we stick out our heads and wave.”

The uncombed heads popping out, and the shy, puckish, manic waving — Beatrice could see it perfectly.

“That’s nice,” she said. “That really is. Those moments of recognition can feel wonderful.” And she meant it, too — she did — but how could she help but also mention the injustice, the indignity, of being always the stagehand but never the star, always on tiptoe, the gentle mover and fixer, condemned to forever facilitate the dazzling achievements of someone else? Not too different, she saw, from her own line of work. On some days, at least. So she should know! “It just sounds hard to me,” said Beatrice.

Maggie tapped her pencil against the kitchen table rapidly. It was clear that something had begun to stir and glow inside her, as hoped. The slow bubbling of ambivalence? The surfacing of secret trouble? Maggie finally held her pencil still. Without looking from her notebook, she said, “So you want me to write that I don’t like being a theater tech?”

Surprised, Beatrice realized it was merely resentment she’d seen stirring, with herself as its object.

“Oh, Maggie, that’s not what I mean. I’m not trying to put words in your mouth. I don’t want to take something you love and turn it into something horrible. I just wanted to help you explore the ways in which this experience might be complicated.”

“Not everything is complicated.”

“But it is! It is!” cried Beatrice. “At least it is in writing. In good, interesting writing. Which is exactly what you’re capable of, and what they’ll be looking for in your essay.”

She thought with despair of the small masterpiece that Emily Radinsky had turned in as her last book report, a sixteen-page first-person narrative imagined from the perspective of a minor character in Elie Wiesel’s Night. It was so beautifully written, so profound in its understanding of family and loss, so simply and astonishingly great, that Beatrice had wept when she read it. She could almost weep now, just thinking of it, and looking at her earnest, resentful, circuit-breaking sister, and knowing how the good people in charge of enrichment programs everywhere would be banging down Emily’s door, and not hers.

“Okay,” said Beatrice, brightly. “Forget complicated. Let’s try thinking about this from a different angle.”

With a soft rustle of paper, Maggie turned to a new page.

AS A VERY YOUNG CHILD, she had been a biter. This was a source of consternation to her mother, developmental interest to her father, and to Beatrice, bottomless delight, serving as it did as proof of the baby’s badass nature, and augury of transgressive acts to come. She liked to think that Maggie’s early exposure to excellent and angry music had possibly played a role. Not just in terms of the biting itself but also, gratifyingly, in the general lack of remorse. “I bite Eli,” Maggie would announce upon arriving home from the playground. “I bite Josh. I bite Georgie. I bite Priya.” Sometimes she’d try to bite Beatrice, too, her chin jutting forward and a wild look coming into her eyes, but this did not in any way diminish Beatrice’s enthusiasm. She just learned to move quickly out of reach; the attacks were swift and for the most part unpredictable. “I bite Mama,” Maggie would say. “I bite Calvin.” Looking on mildly from the sofa, their father said, “The real question is, what is she trying to tell us?”

Maybe she was trying to say, My teeth hurt. My T-shirt is scratchy. I don’t want to wait my turn for the slide. I’m sick of the park, of the trees, of the picnic benches. I’m tired of sunshine and shade, of pita bread in plastic bags. I’m sick of my car, my yard, my crib, my house, and the friendly, baffled people who live there. The strange smell embedded in the carpet. The long dark painting above the fireplace. The breathless feeling in the air, as if everyone were about to turn around and disappear. All of them: the boy peering at his turtle in the tank, the girl clattering down the stairs and singing at the top of her lungs, the man hovering in the doorway, finger tucked in a half-closed book, and the woman making fireworks explode in the huge battered woks that teeter on the stove. Noisy, large, and omnipresent — so why does it feel as if one day they might all disappear?

Maggie clamped down on her father’s salty forearm. Beatrice laughed. Calvin grimaced. Mama said something reproving. It was directed at Beatrice, not the biter. “Why did you bite Papa?” asked their father, looking into the eyes of the little girl. “Can you use your words and tell Papa?” Maggie pulled away and careened across the room with perfect indifference as Beatrice watched dumbly in wonder and envy. She had been plotting her own minor rebellions for years and had yet to cultivate this cavalier air. She would never be truly punk rock. She worried too much about making other people cross with her. Her hair was a police-light blue, her ears sparkling with hardware, her boots heavy enough to stomp someone senseless, and she still couldn’t bring herself to spit out her gum on the sidewalk. Nobody likes a litterbug, she heard a voice saying. Fuck you! she told the voice, who simply chuckled. And now her mother was mad at her. Unbearable. Her black-haired, smooth-limbed, no-nonsense mother. What had she said? “You’re making this harder.” Or maybe, “You’re not helping.” Not cruel or cutting words, exactly, but enough to make you wither inside, especially when spoken by the person who was cooking you dinner, as she had every night for the past how many years, her silky arms scarred from the sputtering oil, scars that on anyone else would be mistaken for freckles.

But if given a choice, Beatrice would take disapproval — which was at least familiar, brisk, and suitably maternal — over the weird stare with which her mother now regarded her when she got home from school. As if Beatrice wasn’t even her child anymore. Her mother would get this look in her eye — this stunned look — and she would gaze up at Beatrice hopefully, like she wasn’t Beatrice at all but a neighbor’s nice kid, a teenage babysitter come to the rescue. As if her very arrival meant that her mother could pick up her purse, point to the emergency list on the fridge, put on some lipstick, and walk out the door. Don’t worry; the baby’s sleeping. Calling over her shoulder. Beatrice dreaded this look. It made her feel queasy. It made her want to do the stupidest, most hopelessly unpunk rock thing — which was to screw up her face and cry, Mama COME BACK.

THEIR MOTHER WAS OUTSIDE in the cold, calling their names. She needed help. Beatrice looked out the kitchen window and saw her in the middle of the frozen yard, deep in contemplation of the gazebo. What was she holding? Was that really a hatchet? In the distance, the door to the toolshed gaped open. Maggie was already flying out the back door, red parka flapping. Their mother stalked around the little structure, her gardening clogs bright against the gray turf, her small black head covered entirely by the crocheted cloche hat that Maggie had produced in a fit of craftiness. Beatrice owned one, too, but didn’t remember where she had put it. Slowly she followed her sister outside, wanting no part in any of this.

One hand occupied with the hatchet, Mama was using the other to grasp the yew bushes by the neck and shake them in an uncharitable way. They grew shaggily at the foot of the gazebo, loyal but disheveled sentries, planted there years before. It seemed that Mama had decided now was the moment to relieve them of their duties. When Beatrice, shivering in her swingy little car coat, suggested that the spring might be a better time, her mother said, “Who knows when you’ll be coming home next?” and with a heavy feeling Beatrice realized that a definite and as yet undisclosed list, including such items as essay revision and tree removal, had been compiled in preparation for her visit.

“Don’t you have anything more practical to wear?” her mother asked, looking askance at the car coat, and the only thing Beatrice could think to say was, “I’ve always liked those bushes. They just need to be pruned.”

“They’re hideous!” Maggie said, and for emphasis kicked at some lower branches with her sneaker. “We’re going to plant wisteria instead. The vines will climb up over the roof and look romantic.”

“It’s a business decision. The bushes have a lot of spiders in them. They make the whole place feel dark.” Mama tested the blade of the hatchet with her fingertip. “No one’s going to want to eat breakfast sitting next to those bushes.”

Beatrice didn’t know what her mother was talking about. She felt both outwitted and outnumbered, but wasn’t ready yet to admit her disadvantage. Meanwhile, Maggie hopped about on the hard ground, waving her arms in the air as she draped the gazebo with prospective vines. “Maybe, if they’re really beautiful, we can increase our rates.”

She jigged some more, her fingers twitching in the happy act of counting money. She glanced coyly at Beatrice. “Maybe we’ll even charge you for a visit.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said their mother. It was unclear whether she meant the rate hike or the new policy regarding family members. In possible consolation she told Beatrice, “I’m going to find you some good work gloves,” and headed off in the direction of the toolshed.

“Charge me?” Beatrice looked at her sister.

“I’m only teeeeeeasing!” Maggie shrieked, and jigged even faster, full of plans. Little seashell soaps! Little tiny bottles of shampoo! And extra towels, folded at the foot of the bed. Foil-wrapped chocolates to be placed on the pillows. Didn’t that sound cozy? She swung gleefully around a gazebo post. There’d be discounts for repeat guests. An added charge during graduation week. But you also had to factor in the 10 percent finder’s fee that went automatically to the agency….

Beatrice tried to focus. She asked, “Are you talking about an inn?”

“A bed-and-breakfast!” corrected Maggie. She then added soberly, “To open an inn, we’d need to get a special license, and those cost a lot of money.”

“We?”

“Me and Mama. We’re business partners. Fifty-fifty.”

“Good grief,” said Beatrice, and wondered how long the two of them had been in cahoots. Probably forever. She imagined coming home again and finding them doing tai chi in their matching pajamas. A terrible joke. And which was more distressing — their merry collusion or the thought of strange people traipsing about her house, putting their feet up on the furniture? She felt, for a moment, an instinctive Victorian horror of one’s family being in trade. She feared that the particular trade of hospitality would sink one even farther. Maybe they should just take in sewing, she thought miserably, picturing her sister’s long, chapped, but clever fingers flying above a seam. But how could she harbor such detestable ideas? When had she become such a nervous little snob? She had aspired to anarchism once, or at least to a Billy Bragg sort of socialism. She’d made a romance out of what she called “regular people” who were experts at living what she called “normal life.” Pickup trucks, domestic beer — delicious! At those punk rock shows on Sunday afternoons, she would lie about where she went to school, ashamed of the grassy quads and classes in French cinema. When asked, she would most often name the very school where Maggie, soon enough, would be walking through the battle-scarred doors. At a certain age, Beatrice had longed to go there herself.

“Look what I found!” their mother called, coming toward them and waving a handsaw. She looked pretty and rosy from the cold and Beatrice felt her heart lurch painfully.

“Are you planning to use my room?” she found herself asking, to her own dismay. This was not at all what she had wanted to say, especially in a voice that sounded high-pitched and sulky. “Using it as part of your business?”

Her mother frowned. “Beatrice, sweetheart. That room is always yours to stay in, whenever you want. You know that.” She held out a pair of crusty gardening gloves.

“Are strangers going to be sleeping there?” The sulky voice persisted. “Don’t you think that’s risky, considering all the valuable things around?”

An opening: her mother nimbly leaped. All those old magazines, she said — they were a serious fire hazard. All those little knickknacks and photos gathering dust on the bookshelves. And what was Beatrice still keeping in her drawers? Certainly nothing she’d ever think of wearing again. In fact, her mother had picked up some empty cartons at the liquor store, and was hoping that over the weekend they could make a trip to the drop-off bin outside the church.

A little box floated beside another item on the list, waiting to be firmly checked.

“That’s archival material, Mama!” The fanzines, the flyers, the packet of ketchup given to her by the drummer from the Volcano Suns. Her first leather jacket. Her first plaid schoolgirl skirt, pleated and saucy. Her first piece of black velvet, held together by safety pins. “You expect me to give away my Sister shirt?”

“You have an apartment,” Maggie said. “You could keep it there.”

“My apartment is minuscule!” Beatrice wailed. “We’re talking about important cultural history here!”

Their mother laughed. “What do you want me to do? Keep your bedroom hermetically sealed? A shrine to your youth?”

“Well, yes.” This was exactly what Beatrice wanted. A shrine. Dim, magical, hushed, undisturbed. Ideally climate controlled, so the vinyl wouldn’t warp. She had never put it into words before, but this was precisely what she was looking for when she came back to the house where she grew up. And, as always, her mother had managed to divine her heart’s desire. She had an uncanny ability to do so, which made her refusal to grant its secret wishes that much more exasperating. How had she known, one summer morning long ago, that Beatrice walked out the back door so purely delighted with herself, feeling like anything at all might occur that day, dressed as she was in torn T-shirt, leopard mini, ripped fishnets, red heels — an outfit ingeniously designed to disguise sluttiness as irony (So Sid and Nancy! she’d thought in the closet) — how had she known her daughter’s happiness? And happened to drive from the post office to the market along the same route that Beatrice was tottering her way to the bus stop? Beatrice heard a car honking from behind (in appreciation, she’d thought) and was discouraged to turn around and find her heat-seeking mother, face aglow, hands wrapped tightly around the steering wheel. Somehow the episode — of thwarted desire; of surprise and humiliation — was remembered as a little piece of family comedy: an opportunity for Mama to roll her eyes and everyone to laugh about the time Bea left the house looking like an insane prostitute. And Beatrice knew even as she now spoke, even as she sighed, “Yes, actually, that’s what I want,” this very moment was becoming laughable, toothless, the time Beatrice tried to turn her bedroom into a museum.

“It’s not like you’re dead!” said Maggie cheerfully, and began kicking at the yew bushes again.

BUT THEIR FATHER WAS DEAD. It was impossible to come home and not think this thought every hour you were there. Maggie the biter had been right all along — everybody in that rackety house would disappear. First Beatrice, off grudgingly to college. Then Calvin, a few years later, with his towering backpack and his untouched passport. Their father next, falling to his knees on a tennis court. And their mother — still strictly present, of course, still standing there agitating her pans on the stove, but you could argue that she had been the first of them to leave. Beatrice wasn’t sure, but she thought it might have happened when Papa moved into the carriage house. Something shifted then; some agreement was reached between their mother and solitude. “You have to understand, Chinese don’t get divorced,” she had said one night when Beatrice and Calvin returned from a long afternoon of cheese sandwiches and Hearts. But she said it with defiance. She said it with a strange sort of exultation. She would be doing what no one else in her family or her acquaintance had ever done. She’d go back to graduate school — something useful, like accounting? University administration? She’d make appearances at parties alone. She’d practice a wartime frugality, keeping wings of the big house unheated and the children in hand-me-down clothes. It was doable. It was demanded of her. She’d pull through; she’d find ways; she would manage. The thought terrifying, but also bracing — like jumping out onto an unknown highway from a car crowded with quarrelsome people and half-eaten bags of cheese doodles and loud staticky music on the radio. The car would screech off into the distance and she would be left by herself on the side of the road, putting one foot deliberately in front of the other, the wind whistling all around.

She would show them!

And so she would have, if not for that stubborn zygote. Who knew that at this late stage things could still take root? She had always given money to Planned Parenthood; she had no qualms in that regard, no qualms at all. Then why she did let nature follow its unruly course? It was the mystery lying at the deep heart of her. Or maybe the answer was simple: maybe she had for once in her life succumbed to sentiment, an occurrence so rare that it tended to confound her, like when she had paid to have Calvin’s first sneakers preserved in bronze.

Unborn Maggie brought everyone home. The shaving kit took up its post in the bathroom; the book of poems returned to the shelf. But pointedly life did not resume where it had left off — upon his return, it was difficult to escape the feeling that their father was anything more than a longtime visitor, there on sufferance. His stay in the carriage house had made him older, and now, like an abashed and absentminded relative, he tried to keep out of their mother’s way. Beatrice wondered if one day she and Calvin would sit down with Maggie over little glasses of sherry and, in the wistful manner of Russian émigrés, attempt to explain what life was like before. The fireflies, the linden trees, the dusky walk down to the edge of the lake — oh, such beautiful brawls! Their handsome father screaming and their lovely, long-haired mother in tears. (Someone forgot to pack the bathing suits.) Then the ceaseless, silent car rides home, with the rising moon close on their tail. The children carried up the staircase: girl in father’s furry clasp, boy in mother’s smooth one. Lying stiffly in bed, under the cool sheets, listening to more shouting from below. Or maybe instead (it was equally possible) to the sounds of the newspaper crackling, of something read aloud in a resonant voice, followed by elliptical laughter.

“And don’t you remember?” Beatrice would ask eagerly of her brother. “Don’t you remember the time we were all watching that dumb vampire movie — you know, the one with George Hamilton? We were watching it on Channel 56 and Papa comes into the room with his big Dracula laugh and your plastic fangs and a big glass of cranberry juice? He chased Mama all over the house…”

Incredible. Maggie would listen to their stories in disbelief. Are you talking about my father? My mother? She had grown up under an entirely different regime.

BACK INSIDE THEY EXAMINED their scratches, small and large. Everyone smelled agreeably piney. “Mission accomplished,” said Beatrice darkly. She would have to take her car coat to the cleaners. Dazed, she and Maggie held their hands beneath the kitchen tap, warming their fingers in the stream of hot water, until their mother walked by and turned it off. She was moving about the room in her old ballet, reaching and dipping, opening and shutting, and Beatrice felt with relief that perhaps the weekend had finally begun: for here was her mother, making them something to eat.

Maggie stationed herself at the table and flipped open a puzzle book. Her mouth found the comforting eraser again. Beatrice watched as a heavy, blank calm settled over her sister’s face.

“Hey!” said Beatrice. “Maggie! I have an idea. Why don’t you read Mama your new essay?”

“She doesn’t like being read to,” said Maggie slowly. “She likes reading things for herself.”

“She’s right,” said their mother, without turning from the counter.

At the far end of the table, Beatrice regrouped. “Not for her sake, for yours. Hasn’t anyone told you about the benefits of reading your work aloud? I make all of my students do it. You pick up mistakes. You hear the rhythm of your sentences. It’s a vital part of the revision process.”

“Oh, all right.” Maggie bent down wearily and dragged forth her backpack. Beatrice smoothed the tablecloth in front of her and tried to arrange her face into a disinterested expression. “Stand up,” she instructed. “Use your diaphragm, it’s good practice.”

“Practice for what?” Maggie asked, but then did as she was told. She held herself erect and read clearly from her notebook. The act of reading seemed gently to change her. She no longer stuck out one skinny hip or did unconscious things with her toes. Her voice was unaffected, pleasant to listen to, and only a few of the words gave her any trouble. As she read, a softness drifted over her like a veil. She looked young and promising and possibly lovely, like a girl her own age, like the girls at Beatrice’s school. She could easily have been one of them: on the verge of something, brimming. With what, it had yet to be revealed, but still there it was, that fullness. As she read, it appeared very possible that she wouldn’t be stuck forever behind the scenery, or pursing her lips above a flute, or folding the guest towels with fastidious content. As she read the words carefully from her notebook, her sister, listening, felt that there was hope.

Maggie looked up and smiled; the last sentence hung charmingly in the air. Beatrice beamed at her from the end of the table. By now their mother had paused in her chopping and was studying them both.

“That essay,” she said, “was about a musical.”

“Yes,” said Maggie, closing her notebook. “Cats.”

“But the play you did was The Caucasian Chalk Circle.”

“I know,” said Maggie. “But Cats just seemed to fit better.”

“Did you notice the parallels she made?” asked Beatrice. “Between the kids who work backstage and all the characters in the play? Each with their own funny quirks and personality!”

Their mother ignored her. She looked steadily at Maggie. “You haven’t even seen Cats.”

“Beatrice told me the whole story. She sang some parts from the songs.” Maggie opened up her notebook again, uncertainly. “You didn’t like it?”

“I’m not saying I didn’t like it.”

“You have to admit, this version is much stronger than the other one,” Beatrice said.

Her mother turned to her. “You were in Cats.”

“It’s called creative nonfiction!” Beatrice cried. She glanced over at her sister, who was silently rereading the pages with a puckered, doubtful expression. “This is a better essay, believe me.”

“I don’t care if it’s better,” their mother declared, and went back to her cleaver and cutting board and the eviscerated bell peppers. “We’ll keep working on it,” she said over her shoulder to Maggie, and then to Beatrice, now standing beside her, “Is this how you help your students at school?”

The question was real, which made it far worse than if it were merely mean. It was all Beatrice could do to keep from throwing herself beneath her mother’s rat-a-tat knife, moving at lightning speed across the board. She was only trying to give Maggie an edge, an advantage — didn’t they understand the urgency? She knew, better than they, what the competition actually looked like. But the two of them seemed determined to proceed innocently, undaunted. Outside in the cold, as Maggie calculated her profits, their mother had mentioned that the high school offered a Young Entrepreneurs Club (Beatrice had asked, Is that like a Young Republicans Club?), then Maggie had chimed in that she could take classes in Mandarin, too. Who needed an ancient, rolling campus? Beatrice realized with a pang that they were busy making the best of things, something that she, so accustomed to the best, had never quite learned how to do.

“Sorry,” she murmured.

She stole a sliver of green pepper; she ran her fingers along the edge of the kitchen table, unearthing her student’s homemade birthday card from beneath the newspaper. On it was a picture of a stick-figure girl with a bubble head and a tiny red mouth — out of her mouth issued a yellow balloon containing the words: Today Is Great! — and inside the card the yellow balloon continued, explaining: Great Because YOU Were Born! (with a smile!) The exclamation marks all carried hearts instead of dots. Standing there, her fingers resting lightly on its surface, Beatrice found herself fighting the urge to open this card, but in the end she lost.

THAT NIGHT SHE RETREATED to her former bedroom, where she sniffed the comforter warily and wondered who else might be sleeping there in months to come. Near eleven Maggie appeared in the doorway with a Ouija board as an offering. “The directions say that you’re supposed to do this with two people.” She climbed up onto the foot of the bed. “A lady and a gentleman preferred, it says, but I think it’ll still work if it’s two ladies.”

Beatrice put down her book. “You’ve really never done this before?”

“In fifth grade Evie Rosenthal came face to face with pure evil,” said Maggie.

She was wearing a faded sweatshirt and a pair of thermal underwear. She didn’t look especially prepared to welcome messengers from the spirit world. Whatever happened to cute pajamas? Beatrice wondered. She thought back sadly on all her little nightgowns, the flowers, the bits of eyelet, the ruffled hems. Even when she turned punk rock she wore pretty things to bed, things sent to her by her grandmothers. But Maggie had no grandmothers — they were all gone, exiting in quick succession, by the time she was four.

“Who are you trying to contact?” Beatrice asked. She saw her Po-Po and her Nana and her Grandma Sara standing there expectantly on the other side, their feeble arms full of red Macy’s boxes with nightgowns tucked into tissue paper. It would be nice to talk to them. They looked as if they desperately wanted to say something kind.

“Oh. I didn’t know you had to pick someone in particular. I just have a few general questions I need answered.” Maggie unfolded the board, and Beatrice, by the water stain in the corner, recognized it as her own. Her father would forget to go down to the basement and empty the dehumidifier. “Can we do that? Just ask the universe? We don’t want to bother anyone.”

“Sure. Why not. We’ll ask the all-purpose universe,” Beatrice said, though this seemed the supernatural equivalent of worshipping at a Unitarian church, with sofas instead of pews, and not a cross in sight. “What are we asking?”

“Just a few business-related things,” said Maggie. “You should think up some questions, too. That way we can take turns.”

“I wouldn’t even know where to begin. We’d be here all night.”

“I don’t mind. Tomorrow’s Sunday.”

“I’m tired, Maggie.”

“I know!” She gave a little bounce at the end of the bed. “You can ask who your next fiancé is going to be!”

Beatrice smiled. That was sweet. She liked how it sounded, as if she were a restless beauty with husbands and broken hearts trailing in her wake, and not a seventh-grade English teacher of dubious judgment and middling abilities whose brief and lucky engagement had ended, and who was now alone. Today was her birthday; today she turned twenty-nine years old.

Whoosh! From out of nowhere, the sheer force of self-pity. She rose sputtering to the surface, soggy and blinded.

“Should we turn off the lights?” Maggie asked.

They lit a candle so they could see. It was shaped like a little seashell and perhaps had come packaged with the soaps. The board shone dully between them, waiting to begin the conversation. Despite herself, Beatrice felt an old flutter of excitement. She had once been an avid practitioner. They would all go down to the basement and allow strange things to occur. She and her friends from school, when they were the same age as Maggie. They rigged towels over the tiny basement window to make the room even darker, and they sat on the cold floor in a circle, and stopped breathing, and the little plastic contraption would go skating wildly across the board. Beatrice liked to speak with the sad ghost of Marilyn Monroe, who said yes to almost every question she was asked. Will it happen? Does he like me? Can I have it? When she said no, it was bad. Someone else had come on the line. Someone angry. Beneath their fingertips, someone tugging. A burnt smell. An electric buzzing in the air. I — AM — SA — They jerked their hands away in fear. They scrambled back from the board, unable to speak, hearts beating fast. They couldn’t look at each other. They couldn’t move. What had they done? What door had they opened? The terror of television static, the scratching of a needle caught in the final groove. Turn it off, fast! That feeling. But they couldn’t move. The door was open. The sound of footsteps on the stairs. Clomp. Clomp. The towel falling from the window with a whump, but no light coming in. The darkness even darker. The footsteps heavy and close. Clomp. Clomp. Hearts racing, lungs panting. Clomp. Clomp. And then—

A big Dracula laugh.

Mwahh-haaa-haaa-haaaaaaa.

“Papa!” she screamed. He came staggering into the basement. His glasses glowed dimly. He held his arms up in the air, as if about to descend on them with a billowing black cape. But he was wearing a tie and sports coat instead. A dank hiccup escaped from the dehumidifier.

Her friends collapsed on each other, shrieking. She let out her breath and folded her arms around him.

“Are your eyes closed?” Maggie asked. “Are you relaxed?”

“Yes,” Beatrice said. She felt everything inside her slowly coming loose.

Her hands joined her sister’s on the contraption. The candle was making the whole room smell like cake. How good it felt to rest her eyes, to rest her fingers on the plastic, to let the unseen forces take over for a little while. She tried to conjure up a picture of the universe and saw styrofoam balls of varying sizes gently bobbing in the breeze. No. That was the solar system, abandoned weeks ago in her homeroom after the science fair. The universe was bigger, much bigger. She would have to try harder.

“I’m asking my question now,” Maggie whispered.

“Go for it.”

“I’m asking it silently, actually. I’m asking it in my head.”

“Then what am I supposed to do?” Beatrice opened her eyes a crack. “The whole point is to be collaborative.”

Maggie sighed, her eyes still closed. “Well. Just think of Mama. Think of Mama and me on a beach in the Caribbean.”

“Doing tai chi?”

“Okay. If you want.” She paused. “Think Aruba.”

That was easy. She could handle Aruba. White sand. Turquoise water. A scattering of cabanas. Beatrice squeezed her eyes shut and drifted over the island. She saw two little figures standing in the surf. Above her the black wind of the galaxies swept by. A passing comet showered her in sparkles. To her surprise, she was turning. And somewhere far away, her hands began to move. She tumbled through the ether like a satellite, keeping one eye fixed on the island below. White sand. Blue-green water. Her hands slid away from her. Which way was Yes? Which way was No? She couldn’t remember. She couldn’t remember if the board was upside-down or not. All she could do was watch the two people circling in slow motion at the edge of the sea. What was it that her sister wanted? An offshore bank account. A Princess cruise. Waves crashed, moons pulled, planets spun. Black holes swallowed everything in sight. The beautiful universe went on and on. I don’t care what she wants, Beatrice thought as her hands traveled below her and she, slowly tumbling, beamed her message into space:

Marilyn?

Papa?

Say yes.