Kimm Brockett Stammen's writings have appeared or are forthcoming in The Greensboro Review, Pembroke Magazine, Prime Number Magazine, and many others. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Spalding University in Louisville, KY. Visit her at kimmbrockettstammen.wordpress.com.
My wife’s sister plays all kinds of flutes. Metal and wood, tarnished and bright, silver, gold, a little painted thing made of tin, a slim jet-black cylinder made of stuff she calls grenadilla, and an antique glass one in a soft leather sachet that through all her traipsings stays miraculously unbroken. She plays beautifully, everyone says. She’s won competitions, travels the world doing concerts, and pops up occasionally in our college town to perform peculiar new music in the dim school theater. Occasionally she calls us up after the children are in bed to say she’s playing in an Irish pub band in the city and we should come along right now. Or she’ll sit in with jazz players late at night, catch a red-eye flight, and phone at five in the morning to say she’s at the airport without cab fare and would it be easy if one of us came out to get her? She has long wavy hair and a rainbow tapestry rucksack, a different boyfriend each week, mostly from far away countries, and if you give her a cell phone that you pay for yourself so that you can keep track of where she has gotten to so that your wife might not worry—because although she has a master’s degree and is always working my wife’s sister never seems to have any cash—sooner or later she’ll drop it in the toilet or lose it or it will end up, somehow, in the pocket of one of the boyfriends, who will eventually answer it and say who is this Tess?
“She’s impossible,” says Mardi, my wife, when we get our phone bill.
Mardi is the elder sister. She has thin, straight, bobbed hair that she combs once in the morning and stays combed all day. This fall she will start her first year as the youngest elementary school principal in our district’s history. She’s carried the same briefcase since she was fifteen. When Mardi was in elementary school herself, drawing neatly with crayons and keeping track of her flyaway sister on the playground, she saw how schools ran, the messes and the importance, and she thought, “I could do that, and I could do it much better.” She told me that thought on our first date. And I saw what I was up against: an unsidetrackable woman. A woman who said straight out she appreciated the detours of imagination but had little herself, possibly because she had little herself. “My sister got all the fun stuff,” she said once. Imagination and music, travel and color, the bag full of nonsensical mismatched pieces of things that somehow onstage add up to pure magic, the way a child with guidance somehow, sometimes, gets to adulthood. Mardi wanted to run a school that nurtured imagination, childhood, play, and yet gave somewhere along the line what her sister had missed out on: responsibility and order. So she goes in every morning in pursuit of colored construction paper monsters and also high test scores and orderly supply closets and budgets that balance. She doesn’t swerve from her goals and I am happy every day that one of them was marrying me.
Their dad died long ago, when the sisters were small. A year ago, their mother, Gloria, began wandering, leaving the house at all hours, sometimes in her nightgown, sometimes with the front door open or all the burners on on the stove. Mardi and I packed up the belongings of her childhood home on Broad St, two blocks from ours, and moved Gloria into a home not far away. Every time we visit she says to my wife, either cruelly or thoughtlessly, “take care of your sister.”
My family is on the other side of the country, stuck in the east coast lifestyle that calls mansions cottages and sends children to sailing camp in the summer and brags while complaining without seeming to do either, and expresses disappointment with sons who choose to live on the less civilized coast and be stay-at-home dads. I go back as little as possible. My real family is Mardi and our two kids and their grandma, a dog, and a hamster and Tess.
. . .
“You did what?” said my wife when I told her I’d bought Tess another phone. I had sudden sympathy with any child sent to her office.
“Of course.”
“It’s what always happens.”
I was baffled. “Yes.”
Mardi stuck her finger in the casserole I’d made for dinner. “It needs five more minutes.”
“It’s fine,” I said, and set it on the table with oven mitts. “We’re okay for money.”
“It’s not that, John!” She poured milk carefully into Tim’s favorite blue glass and Marie’s sippy cup.
I yelled at the kids for dinner. “Try not to make a mess everybody,” I said when we all sat down. “The dishwasher’s on the fritz again.”
Tim of course peered at the dishwasher and wanted to know what a fritz was. I imagined the wheels turning in his mind, seeing perhaps the dishwasher sitting on a little gold chair or a strong furry animal. Marie immediately turned her milk upside down and shook it.
When dinner was over I cleared away, wiping the dining table down. Mardi covered it with papers, brought out her packet of different colored pens, lined up her folders, and continued preparing for September. We had an office, but it was small and crowded, and the hamster’s cage, its sour hay smell and whirred wheel, lived in a corner of it. And she liked not only the expansiveness of the dining table, but that she had to clear everything away after working, and couldn’t leave things for later, to sit around and get lost. I liked it that she worked at the dining table because we could talk as I cleared.
“I just don’t think we should always be rescuing her,” she said, after the papers were organized into neat piles. Reading glasses perched on the tip of her nose, she sliced through a line of text with her red pen. “She’s got to grow up.”
My fingers were pruned from dishwater. Tim, in the living room with blocks and books, whistled softly under his breath as he constructed some kind of tower. Marie was in her high chair in the kitchen so I could watch her while I washed up.
“She’s perfectly content not to have one, I think. There’s no other way to make sure we can reach her.”
“How does she arrange her concerts? Keep in touch with her agent? And why am I always the one who calls Mom?”
Marie started wiggling and thrashing, getting restless. I put some just-washed Tupperware and a spoon on her tray, and she immediately started to find out how many different banging sounds she could make. Marie was the loud one, who wasn’t going to sit confined in a high chair very long.
I went back into the dining room, wiping a pot with a dishtowel, and just looked at my wife. “She’s twenty-nine,” I said unnecessarily. “She might be as grown up as she’s going to get.”
“Macaroni and cheese.” Mardi muttered her schoolteacher expletive, piled all the papers into her ancient briefcase, and slammed it shut so hard it broke at the hinges.
. . .
I met Tess for the first time a few weeks before I married her sister. She was in town for a concert. Mardi and I went, and it was this daft little group in a college small hall, with a lot of professors and strangely dressed people. Men in long gray hair and elbow patches—actual elbow patches made of worn suede—and pierced women with sticking-up hair. The music suffered from its notes. It was crowded with disjointed sounds that seemed designed to fit as badly as possible with whatever else was going on. Sometimes there were passages that were obviously very difficult, the players concentrating with brows furrowed, leaning into their stands as racket whirled out of their instruments like sparks from a campfire on which rocks have been tossed. All the performers did small bows at the end, in a raggedy line, and looked at once bored and smug, as if they’d accomplished something so momentous they didn’t need praise. All but Tess, who was grinning. She flung her arms out wide before bowing low, nearly whacking a gray-bearded cellist with her flute.
Next to me Mardi shook her head ruefully and smiled the way she did sometimes at her pupils; as if she really shouldn’t encourage their behavior but occasionally she just couldn’t help it. “That’s my sister all over,” she had said.
“She’s splendid.”
“Just wait.”
. . .
On September 5, the first day of school for Brown Elementary students and their new principal, at five-thirty in the morning, right as Mardi was heading out the door with her plans and notes in the new briefcase I’d given her—a thing of quiet magnificence in muted buff leather, the same color as her hair, that I had saved months for and for which I’d put off the repair of the dishwasher—the phone rang.
“Ignore it,” I said. “I’ll phone back later, whoever it is.”
But she ignored me instead, and picked up the landline in the hall. Her mother had fallen in the night and broken her hip. Mardi rushed to the hospital and was late to school her first day, while I stayed home with the children. She tried to phone Tess and got no answer. The hospital said the break was bad and her reaction to the anesthesia worse, and two days later pneumonia set in, and then pain and delirium.
We sat by Gloria’s bedside the next day. It was Saturday; a neighbor was home with the children. Gloria could barely speak, was barely conscious, but she looked at Mardi and began wringing her hands, tugging and twisting with the right at her swollen-knuckled left hand. We at first thought it was the arthritis that was causing her pain; she was twisting at her hand and fingers, and grimacing. We tried to stop her, but she had given her two daughters nothing if not stubbornness, and after a while we began to understand what she was doing. She kept at it until the knuckle of her fourth finger was red, Mardi was furious, and against her protesting I went and got some liquid hand soap and some lotion from the bathroom. Then I held Gloria's slippery hand above her head.
“How can you help her do this? I don’t want it,” she yelled at me and stomped, uncharacteristically, out of the room.
When Gloria and I finally got her wedding ring off, she took it in her slick swollen fingers and said what she always said when we visited, sooner or later. “Where’s Tess?” She looked around vaguely, then patted my hand, put the ring in it, and said, “Give this to her.”
I put it in my pocket.
“She’s planning to go,” Mardi said when she returned.
I just nodded. Mardi signed some papers and they moved her mother to hospice by ambulance. Mardi kept track of the meds and went every evening and brushed her mother’s still-long wavy hair. Her mother slept fitfully, her breathing more and more labored. We phoned Tess and left messages, both Mardi’s and mine increasingly brusque.
On the day that her mother died, a concert flyer appeared in the pile of mail on the counter. There was a photo of a fearsome gothic organ, superimposed with scrolled text. “Predstavenie Tess Buchanan/ v koncerte 19. Septembre/ Chrám sv.Jakuba, Levoča.” Mardi and I had just come home from the hospice, thanked our neighbor for looking after the children again, and were wandering around our house as if we somehow didn’t know it anymore. We hadn’t yet told the children that they could see Grandma one more time, but she would be sleeping. Mardi picked up the flyer. “Where is it? Slovakian? Slovak? It was two weeks ago!” She threw it down on the dining table.
I examined the flyer. Neither of us had gotten much sleep since the first day of school. The gothic cathedral seemed to swim in front of my eyes. Although I had found a manual online and fussed with its motor, the dishwasher was still wonky—I’d begun setting aside cash behind the flour canister for a new one—and it whined rhythmically in the background with a sound that wrapped around me and seeped into my bones. I was too tired to think clearly, and I hadn’t known Mardi’s father, but her mother had gently welcomed me into the family, gone with us on vacations to the coast and the mountains, and held our babies. I defended her daughter. “She must have sent it before your mom fell.”
“Or she doesn’t listen to her messages, or she lost the damn phone again.” I heard the edge of hysteria, so rare in my wife that the only other time I’d observed it, the only reason I knew it existed, was when she was in labor with Marie for over thirty hours, and for a few moments we lost the baby’s heartbeat. Mardi screamed and swore and slapped at the monitor again and again until I grabbed her wrists and held them down. And after a beat, after infinity, the small blips had resumed.
Tim dashed into the room with a superman pillowcase over his head, singing a loud song I’d helped him make up about kryptonite. He banged into my leg, bounced off, and hit the side of his head against the kitchen table.
“Timmy! Dammit!” yelled Mardi.
Tim looked at our faces and began to cry.
It was ten-thirty a.m., the mail had sat on the table since the day before; it was dotted with drippings of pancake batter. Tim and Marie were fed but not dressed.
“She has absolutely no clue,” Mardi whispered.
“At least we know where she is—“
“—where she was—“
“—and that she’s okay,” I ended lamely.
Mardi looked at the brochure again, the soaring arches and flying buttresses and strange words, a triumph that likely took a hundred years and many skilled laborers to create, and destroyed at least as many in the process. She had not asked me about the ring, hadn’t remarked on the thin band of smooth skin on her mother’s finger, paler and unlined where it had been sheltered by gold.
“It’s not enough,” she said, and I was afraid that she meant it.
. . .
Tess played at our wedding. She arrived late and we had to hold the whole thing for her, with my family frowning on folding chairs set up in our back garden, and the butter sculpture made by a kind but eccentric neighbor melting in the spring sun. It cost us an extra $135 for the minister’s time, too. But Tess did arrive, wearing a long pink shawl with cutout designs fluttering in the breeze in all directions, so that she looked like a snowflake in a sunset. She was something. She played one of her flutes and I almost forgot what I was standing in front of all those people for, almost forgot that my parents were in the second row and my older brother wore a silk suit in dark gray that outshone my rental tux and new shoes from Penney’s. I have no idea what she played but it fluttered in the breeze like her clothing, and made me conscious of the warmth in the air; conscious of promise. As I was listening I stared at my almost-wife’s chin, the pale freckled delicacy of the skin over the small square jaw, the freshness and strength of her hand in my sweaty one. And yes, I loved both sisters: the one that I saw and the one that I heard; the one with whom I would make a life, and the one who would flit in and out of it; the one I held and the one who could never be held down.
. . .
I kept phoning Tess when Mardi was at school. I left more messages, I phoned the church in Belgrade and got through to someone who spoke enough English to confuse both of us thoroughly. I phoned the consulate in Slovenia. I phoned the phone company. At eleven one morning, when Mardi was at school for an in-service day and I was home with the kids, the dishwasher, with a long wrenching squeal, gave up the ghost and spit foamy brown water all over our kitchen floor.
And then the phone rang.
“I left my bag on a train, can you wire me some money?” Tess’s voice sounded tinny and faint. The brown water slid towards the refrigerator.
“Where are you?”
“Munich.”
“Really?!”
“Please? Western Union.”
The children shrieked, the dog barked, and small feet heading in my direction pummeled the floor. I put my hand over the phone and yelled, “Stop! Don’t come in the kitchen unless you put your boots on!”
On the phone Tess had been talking. “…in love with the Marienplatz. There’s the famous mechanical clock and every noon, when the square’s crowded with tourists and gawkers, I stand underneath it and listen and play songs I make up to go along with the bells. The glockenspiel and chimes, the little guys who march in and out, I haven’t figured it out yet, but I love it, people love it, they love my music, and there’s a Brazilian guy who mimes along when I play.” Her words tumbled through the static of the phone line, like notes from mallets all being hammered at once.
“Tess.”
The children, with the hamster in hand and the dog at their feet, had stopped, startled, at the kitchen door. Dirty water burbled slowly from under the dishwasher.
“Your mom had a fall,” I said cautiously. “Didn’t you know?”
“What?”
“We’ve left you so many messages.”
“The phone works but it doesn’t take messages.”
“Then why don’t you answer it?!” I yelled, and the dog whined and would have run away were it not for Tim’s small sturdy grip on his collar.
“John…what?”
It was only after I hung up that the dog escaped and dashed away, and the children chased after instead of looking at my blazing face. They roared through the dining room, around via the living room and the hall, made a ruckus in the den, and then raced into the kitchen through the other door. Squalling and slipping, they splashed through the puddles while I added to them a few tears of impotent rage, unnoticed in the tanged filthy wiggle of limbs and fur and wriggling terrified hamster.
. . .
I wired my sister-in-law the flour canister money, plus some advanced from our credit card, and she caught a flight home. She came and stayed on the couch, and from her rucksack pulled out Slovakian dolls made of corn husks and wire, chocolate, and thick brightly colored woolen stockings called Strumphe. The children tumbled in her lap and poked their small fingers in her springy coils of hair, the dog lay at her feet and licked her ankles. I served a stew, tinged with enough cayenne to sting without making the children wail. After dinner—while she was unpacking her flutes and polishing them so that the grenadilla shone like deepest mystery and the delicate antique glass one winked in the light, as if everything were a joke—from somewhere deep in her rucksack, the phone rang repeatedly. After a while Tess dug it out and had a long conversation with someone called Raphael that seemed to require alternating placation and giggles. Mardi worked at the dining room table. She looked calm, but her fingers squeezed the colored pens and index cards tightly, and she didn’t look up.
“We’re not doing it anymore,” Mardi said after Tess sacked out on the couch and we got the children to sleep. “No more cab fares or phones or plane tickets or Western Union.”
I nodded. It didn’t seem unreasonable. I supposed it was past time. Perhaps we had coddled her, perhaps she would have grown up more quickly, or just differently, if we hadn’t always been there to catch her.
“What if some day she’s really in trouble?” I asked. “What if she really needs us?”
We were in our bedroom, pawing through piles of clean unfolded laundry, Mardi for tomorrow’s outfit, I in search of pajamas.
“Like we needed her?” Mardi corrected herself. “Like I needed her?”
And she lay down in the laundry, and curled up in it, dry-eyed. Looking the same way she had when she came back from the hospital after signing the papers.
“She hasn’t got anyone else.” I kneeled down, stroked her back.
“Are you fucking kidding?” My wife never swore. “She’s got the world.”
I went through the house, checked that the back door was locked, turned off the hall lights, picked up a stray stuffed animal. I peeked in at the children. Tim slept, as usual, the wrong way ’round on the bed, with his feet under the pillow. I touched Marie’s cheek, it was warm and pink like an apple on its tree basking in sunlight. With the dishwasher completely broken and off, there was no clanking and moaning; the house slept in near silence. I could hear only the faint clicks and drips of it cooling, settling in for the night. I slipped into the living room and looked down at Tess. Her hair washed over the pillowcase, her mouth hung slightly open. Both hands clutched the blanket. I brushed the hair away from her face, uncovering her ear, which twinkled in the dimness with her many piercings. I leaned over and kissed her temple, and the scent of her hair stayed with me as I went back to the bedroom. I covered Mardi—still blank-eyed in the laundry—with a blanket and climbed into bed.
. . .
When they were small, and fit through the window opening on the second-floor bathroom of their childhood home, Tess often climbed out, and ran around in the crisp night in her nightgown, singing. Hugging trees. Seeing how long she could last before their parents found her, grabbed her, paddled her, and put her back in her bed. It was one of the things Mardi told me about, after we first made love. Tess climbing out at night, inching along the steep roof, jumping off into soft pine needles. “All for no reason,” Mardi said, “except the night-smell of the trees.” And she had added, “I was so scared.”
. . .
The memorial service was a simple affair at the gravesite. It was a bitterly cold October day, with wind that bit through my wool dress coat, and bright sun whose empty warmth, filtered through the thinning maple trees, mocked. Nevertheless, there was a crowd; my mother-in-law had been a kind woman and a special education teacher, and there were many former students and their parents there: older couples hunched against their lives and the weather.
Tess played. The music—I think by one of Bach’s sons—came not from the cylinder of silver, but from somewhere either in her chest or her mind, or simply from the air around her. The melodies carried, extending past phrases and breath, on the air, complicated, even puzzling in their structure, and yet sorting themselves out miraculously in the instants before vanishing. I closed my eyes, smelled the scarlet and umber of leaves ready to fall, the dust closet smell of my coat. Mardi stood next to me with her head bowed but her eyes still staring, hands clutching each other in front of her.
I had, stupidly, gotten out the ring from behind the flour canister, after making six trays of blond walnut brownies for the reception, and put it in a small box in my jacket pocket. Where it nudged my left forearm as I listened to the music, with the shaking weakness of a hesitant groom.
. . .
“Just wait,” Mardi had said, when I first met Tess, first heard her play.
I doubt she’d known then what she meant, not really. ‘Impossible,’ her family had always said about Tess, with a head shake that jarred loose a half smile. Disapproval and acceptance in one motion. “Impossible” meant the same thing as music: something that couldn’t be grasped or contained; something that teased and tickled emotions, found and woke them and aggravated them where they burrowed. And then flitted away, an unimaginably fleet humming creature that’s tasted the red sugar water you kindly leave out.
Mardi didn’t know, then, that “impossible,” over the years—years of repeated neglect, of aiming in different directions, of tiredness—really did come to mean untenable. That there would be a final action, or a lapse of action, a missing in action, that could not be nodded away. A time when “impossible” became not just a word but a thin band of skin where something precious had dwindled, worn molecules wandering one by one into the air, until finally—after all the years of your life and more—without a sound, it slipped off. She didn’t suspect then that without the smile, the head shake would be a motion of riddance—of obedience, of guilt, of anger—or that afterwards there might be a new acceptance: of Tess as she was, but also of ourselves, and our limits.
. . .
After the service and the condolences and the minister and the shaking of hands and the sloppy hugs from Gloria’s old students, it came down to the three of us, in our car, driving back to our house; we had left the children at home with a sitter. I was in the backseat with two cakes beside me and a tray of sandwiches left over from the reception on my lap. Mardi parked in our driveway and pulled the brake. I had thought to do my duty with the ring at some private moment, and never mention it to Mardi again, but instead I managed to pull the box out of my pocket and hand it up to Tess just as she was getting out. I still see the stricken surprise on both sisters’ faces as Tess turned, body bent back into the car, and opened it. Their mom had worn it for the nineteen years since their father died, and for thirty-three years before that. I looked at my wife’s profile, as she looked up at her sister. Too sensitive, they both were; too much alike and too different.
“You are the one who deserves it,” Tess said to her sister.
Mardi took a deep breath of the truth, and began to cry, and I decided not to wait any longer. I took Tess’s hand and slipped the ring on her finger.
“I already have one,” said Mardi. “It’s okay.”
And I turned my palm up for the phone.
