“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
