Nora Burkey

Belonging

        It is June as usual and for the twelfth consecutive year I am north of Montreal visiting her again, like I do every summer after promising myself not to, probably because Chris is right. I am weak when it comes to her.
        “How did this happen?” I had asked Chris. “I was so close this time.”
        “I knew you weren’t serious,” he’d said. “I don’t know why you thought this year was different.”
        Because this year I had thrown the Learn French! tapes out in early May so as to make the Veronica sanction official. French can be a very beautiful language, but it can also be used for evil. Every year it’s the same thing: her comments about the mandate to write road signs in French, the condescending tone when explaining if they must write in English, it must be so-and-so times as small and it really must be discouraged more, don’t you think Debbie? She gets such a thrill from pointing out how far she has come from home and how much I have stayed the same, English language and all.

        In truth this year what lured me is she promised big news, so eleven hours after leaving New York State I am on her boyfriend’s new porch listening to the sound of warm Laurentian weather whistling to the trees, sipping tonic.
        “Alcohol is not going to kill you,” Veronica says. “Just because it killed dad doesn’t mean it’s going to kill you.”
        “I know that. I’m just really not used to alcohol anymore. Chris doesn’t do too much drinking.”
        “Vraiment! And what may I ask do you do?”
        “I do the cleaning,” I say.

        “That’s really not very funny,” Veronica scowls. Since she met her boyfriend, Ron, down in Florida, she’s become a career feminist, choosing to ignore rather than overcome the minds that raised her. On the one hand Dad did a lot of sewing, but he also chose Mother’s bedtime; perhaps he thought a good night’s sleep could cure bad arthritis.
        I suspect Veronica’s feminist calling appeared around the same time Ron announced his preference to work inside the home, because as she says, somebody needs to support his goddamn acreage. She now works in town at a battered women’s shelter that provides care and cell phones. The country, Ron explained with scotch in hand (like everything he should be, an intellectual, a stranger), is old-fashioned, but he simply can’t leave it. It’s his worship, his church. He’s sure the land is less familiar to him than it is to me, even though I only come once a year. He can barely find any one spot the same as the next, any homogeny amongst the trees and the beavers plaguing the lake, or amid the birds providing a symphony for morning coffee. Veronica beams at Ron’s poetic phrases and I catch the smile he throws her, the hungry look directed between her legs. She is sitting with her knees to her chest in cut-off jean shorts, the end of a cigarette trailing from the arm wrapped around her shins. I follow his eyes and stare at her crotch too, noticing how skinny and big-breasted she looks, how smoking has maintained her figure. She is years ahead of me. For an instant I wish I was the kind of person people could see with a cigarette in her mouth, no questions asked. I wonder what does Ron think of smoking?
        “Do the cell phones at your job even get much service out here?” I ask.
        “It’s Quebec, Debbie. Jesus God, where do you think we are, The Congo? See, this is what I was telling you Ron.”
        Ron says to Veronica in his flawless French accent, “Alright Ron, it’s okay,” and says to me, “Deb, we actually do get quite a bit of service out here. There was a campaign for it a while ago.”
        “Does it ever get confusing that you two go by the same name?” I ask.

        “No. Why, does it confuse you? I thought you were the smart one,” she says.
        “I was just trying to be funny.”
        “Well don’t try. You’re not really a funny person.” And then Ron laughs at what Ronnie has said and I realize how much I hate my sister.
        From the time Veronica was two and I was born, we’ve been better enemies than friends. She hated me for stealing her place at the center, for wearing the dresses that didn’t fit her anymore. It was one Sunday after church when our mother was beside herself happy, exclaiming on the phone to her girlfriend that Ronnie finally wanted to play with Little Debbie, like a gift from the heavens. She picked me up and told Mother that I was her doll and Mother told her friend how cute, I was Ronnie’s doll, and then there was a loud shriek as Mother dropped the phone from her ear and ran to retrieve me from the floor. Veronica had dangled me by the hair, butterscotch like hers, and let me go right there on the hardwood.
        Ron’s laughter is present but it doesn’t last. As it dies I ask, “So how is your family, Ron?”
        “You’re looking at a new uncle!” he says.

        “I am! Well, congratulations!”
        “Thank you. Ronnie and I are thinking of trying for ourselves actually.” And there is the big news; her pending accomplishment like a bastard, an unwelcome reminder of my place. My finish in second always behind Veronica, a twelve-year-long reason for hating these annual trips, the answer Chris will never know and never guess. Veronica has won, despite herself. Since age sixteen when she took her first lover, she’d never settle, never satisfy with just one. Even after driving to Florida to be with her then boyfriend, Navy enlisted Alexander, she found she preferred his Lieutenant’s bed instead and later she preferred Ron. Twelve years later she has stuck to him and he to her (out of love for each other, for Canada?) and I am still among the immature, a child who does not belong and does not grow. I am living with Chris who once forgot the date of my birthday, and down the street from Mother, asking if she will be okay to eat dinner alone, or would she like me to stop over. Is it Ronnie who has finally transformed? Is she finally done, finally mature and settled? And is it like she said, am I the one to have stayed the same, to have failed?
        “Wow. That’s great,” I say. I look over at Veronica, but she is looking at how the dark night blankets the tree tops, thinking, likely, about how much she deserves this life.
        “What? Ah oui, a baby. I hope it’s a girl. I want to raise someone like me. You know, do it right.”
        Livid, I say, “I know you don’t think so, but our mother wasn’t that bad, Veronica. And I know more words than just yes and no.”

        She says, “Ron, sweetheart, are you sure you didn’t put something in her drink? She’s delusional.”
        I think of speaking, but suddenly I am exhausted. I can’t stand to be near her any longer, yet I remain in place and wonder did my father feel this same way, tired and impossibly stuck? Is it wrong to admire my father for being like me, being the one man who eventually became exhausted with Veronica, to admire him for not having the immunity of Mother?
        It was the night Ronnie turned sixteen and didn’t leave a note, and drove to the movies with her lover. That word, it killed my mother. She sobbed, not knowing what to do with a daughter who calls a young boy her lover, worried Veronica would become like Stevia’s child with the tattoos and piercings somewhere between the ears. Somehow it did not worry Mother to keep secret how Dad fell asleep at the wheel when looking for his daughter. She even maintained a good pattern, a heartfelt show of it. She’d begin with crying then saying no one could find Dad, crying and saying no one could find him, and then pulling herself together once and for all to say that’s it, he is nowhere to be found, before starting over again the next day. She was sorry—these words were intended to help—but of course Ronnie and I found out the truth, that he turned up after all, and was put straight into the ground. Mother later told us the death and the accident was alcohol induced, she was sorry for not saying so earlier, but she didn’t want Ronnie blaming herself for the damages.
        I asked my mother once did she think she made a mistake, telling Veronica that is was alcohol what killed Dad when it was really my sister’s own selfishness, and just like when I ask now if she is okay to eat dinner alone, Mom had responded, “That’s funny. I don’t know what you mean.”
        “You know what I mean,” I had said.

        “Who’s selfishness? I don’t know what you mean,” she’d said.
        For years this controversy was both Veronica’s and mine, but recently I have come to wonder whether it only belongs in my history. I remember my father being much too tired to drive, as he had stayed up the night before to finish sewing Ronnie’s prom dress he found half-finished on discount. Is this what Ronnie remembers? Does she recall this as Dad’s very own shining moment of feminism, or does she think more simply, Mother had arthritis and was better off keeping her hands to herself and away from needles? Does Ronnie remind herself that only a true sexist could have chosen to keep his family poor over allowing his women to work a day outside the home? The prom dress would be bought with his extras, he’d said; Veronica was to do no labor of her own. No doubt she remembers this.
        Now she hasn’t seen our mother in years, a free spirit like her not able to stand having to hide the hair dye in the trash, to leave a note all the time, or to call the minute she arrived anywhere with the car. Here on the porch I look at Ronnie and I tell her that she really ought to come home and see Mother. “She misses you.”
        “I have a better idea. Why don’t you move away from her? You really need to be your own person.”
        “I am my own person.”
        “Not as far as I can see.”

        “So to be my own person I have to move as far away from home as possible, into the French Canadian woods?”
        “Je pense, oui.“
        “You know what, why don’t we just take a break, hm?” Ron cuts in. “Debbie, would you like to take a walk with me? You can stay here and finish up your drink, Ron.”
        “Fine,” she says.
        “Fine,” I say.

        I follow him downstairs and he throws me a net in the shape of a jacket. “For the mosquitoes,” he says.
        I follow him down the road because the woods are too dark at this time of night, but I prefer this sight. The road traces the lake and I can stare outward as I walk instead of at my own two feet, as I am known to do in the morning hiking up their backyard hills. Moonlight dances across the lake and the solitary car that passes us dances across the road. Ron, a few paces ahead of me, looks like a revelatory figure through the netting covering my face, and I picture for an instant getting lost with him on the lake. We are in a canoe with no one to see but one another, nowhere to go but further out, and we do. I imagine the white linen he is wearing, how it stays impossibly dry even as the water enters shyly over the ledge, how his black hair remains shiny against the dark blue sky.
        After a while of not speaking he says, “I know you’d like Veronica to come home and see your mom, but you have to realize it’s just not her.” When I don’t agree by saying nothing, he adds, “Look, did you ever ride horses?”
        “No.”
        “Well, I grew up with them, and the thing about horses is you have to let them go. For instance when you’re going over a jump, the instinct is to pull back on the reins, but you can’t. If you pull back, the horse will refuse the jump. What you have to do is let the reins go a little, not drop them, but keep them loose. Then the horse is free to jump, and sometimes he’ll jump even higher than he needs to.”
        “I see. And this horse is Veronica, I’m guessing?”

        “I know it sounds silly, but she needs to be free. Horses are wild animals, Debbie. But you know what keeps them tamed despite their wild nature? They love their owner.”
        I wonder how Veronica would feel about this imagery, maybe as sick as she looks when telling me what a boy, what a child, Christopher is. Is it wrong to feel the way I do? Wrong to desire feeling as though I belong to Chris? I look over at Ron and I know I would never belong to him. I am plain, nothing like Veronica. My hair won’t fall in the same way hers does: still colored and still full of life, like an embrace never weakened. I have Dad’s build, burly and strong like a man. Ron would never love me, never stroke my back at night until I fell asleep, never teach me to ride a horse and watch as I go free. Slowly I see myself falling in love with him, right there on the road, loving him as my owner, watching him with puppy dogs eyes before he sets down my food, the meal he has prepared for our anniversary, the wine he’s let breathe. And at the end of the night, I will come first, as it should be, and he will rub my back until I fall asleep, naked against his chest. We could be the greatest love story of all time, here, alone in the woods without shirts on our backs. Is this why I hate Veronica, why I do not speak French?
        “I am so happy to love her,” he says. “I’ve never been happier. But you know something? Anyone would be fortunate to have you too. You’re very giving, you know. You take care of people. That’s really nice to have.”
        And just like that, he’s hurt me irreparably. He is a fraud. He’ll never love me, never appreciate me. He is cold and I am turning to ice too right before his eyes, though he doesn’t
notice. I do not belong to him, yet strangely he loves me like an owner (is it only the owned who love?). He loves me the way a person loves his dog, the way a person likes to be attended to by the creature that runs to the door every time he arrives through it, the snouted animal who doesn’t know the other is sick or full of spite or stupidly hateful.
        “I’m getting cold. I think I’d like to go back,” I say.
        “Of course. Veronica gets cold at night too.”

        When we go back to the house, Ron wants to fall asleep. He wants to wake up to Veronica crawling into his bed, her bare, playful legs against his own. He wants to wake up to his girlfriend and daughter to be, both begging him to lay inside them and love them deeply. Ron, hateful, beautiful Ron, releases me, and I know I am only delaying the inevitable in finding my way to the porch to talk with my sister one last time before everyone, every sound and every lamp descends. She is sitting in the same position, knees high and nursing her gin. She is astoundingly beautiful. She is French.
        “Is he gone?” she asks.
        “I think he went to sleep.”
        “Good. Look, I’m sorry about before. You know I love you.”
        “Sure.”
        “And I really do think it’s great you’re with mom still. I guess one of us has to be. I should really thank you anyway, you know. Because I’m just glad it’s not me.”

        “None of us has to be with her. I just am.”
        “Look, let’s just get over it. I need to tell you something anyway.”
        “Okay.”
        Quickly, she says, “Okay. I think I’m going to leave him.” She says it like it’s nothing, like the world is not laughing to a crumble beneath me. I want none of this to be happening, and now it’s happening much too fast.
        “What?”
        “There’s nothing else for me to experience with Ron. I’m pregnant, Deb. I’m keeping the baby, and I want to raise it on my own.”

        “What about Ron?” The words are desperate sounding and I begin to feel as though the mosquitoes that kept away from me on the walk are biting my skin, as if to get back at me for wearing protective netting. I scratch my arms but nothing changes.
        “What about him? I don’t need a man to take care of me,” Veronica says.
        “But it’s his child too. He wants a baby.”
        “I think children are better off without men. We’d have been better off, don’t you think?”
        “You don’t remember our parents at all, do you?”
        “What’s to remember? He was a drunk and they both hid it from us for a long time. What’s he ever done for me? He bought me a half-finished prom dress, that’s what he did. And he was too dead and mom too crazy to sew the rest. Look, hate me all you want, but I’m just not the kind of person who does things with the help of anybody else. I always saw myself having a baby on my own, you know that. It just happened to be Ron’s seed.”

        As I am sitting across from my sister, the woman I’ve known as long as I’ve been alive, I can’t figure out how two people can grow up under the same roof and have an experience completely anti to the other one. I can’t figure out whether she is nature or nurture, or if it really matters. I know that I will go home to my Christopher, and tell him that I love him, planning to say it until I know for sure if it is true. I will think of Ron, and how happy our brand new family might have been. I will tell Mother that I couldn’t find Veronica, she was nowhere to be found, and I was sorry. Would I pray she’d tell me say no more, she knows what I mean, and none of it is funny, nothing ever is? Or would I prefer the response I was sure to receive, the avoidant, “Debbie, sweetheart, you’re not the kind of person who does well away from home, you know that. She knows that too, don’t you worry. You just let this up to me.”
        Will I tell Veronica we are now up to thirty-something leaflets, Chris and I? But even as I think it I know I won’t say they are sitting in our drawer below the phone, one after the other. I won’t reveal that Mother won’t stop with them, the Have You Seen This Person? mailings with Ronnie’s and Alexander’s sixteen year old faces. At the time I had thought Mother might have found out around town, like we as children learned about Dad’s death. Perhaps she did, but she never quite knew what I meant when I asked about the rumors of Montreal I knew to be true. The last words Veronica said to her were a vacant “I love you.” Now on the porch I look at Veronica’s detestable stomach, and know that when I return home I will go to sleep in Chris’s bed, and I will think to myself, perhaps it is best for Mother to leave it at I love you, and for me to face the next June only as it comes.
        As I stand to take my leave from the porch, I look down at Veronica and I am strangely tempted to kiss the top of her head. She is mesmerizing, her body so perfect, so inviting and abruptly I become aware of how easy it would be even for me to fall in love with her. She is beautiful, a wild animal like Ron said, but she is not tame, she is not to be touched or petted. Scared she may bite off my head like a dog if I presume all beauty is mine to keep, I say instead from the doorway, “I think I need to go to bed, Veronica. I’m really tired all of a sudden.”

Author Bio

Nora Burkey recently completed her B.A. in Creative Writing from Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts. She is currently teaching English and computer classes in Siem Reap, Cambodia for The Ponheary Ly Foundation. This is her first published story.