Энн Пэтчетт - The Dutch House

“Or not,” Maeve said.

“I see the girls sometimes. Do you see the girls? They have better manners. If you ask me, they’re the ones to feel sorry for.”

I shook my head, “We don’t see them.”

Mrs. Buchsbaum squeezed my forearm and then waved goodbye to Maeve. “You can always come in the house,” she said, and we thanked her as she walked away.

“Mrs. Buchsbaum corroborates my memory of the past,” Maeve said when we were alone again.

After andrea and the girls had moved into the Dutch House and Maeve was back at school, my father and I were closer. My care had always been my sister’s responsibility, and now that she was gone he took an unexpected interest in my schoolwork and my basketball games. No one thought that Maeve’s role in my life was transferable to Andrea. The real question was to what extent I, at eleven, was old enough to lead an unsupervised life. Sandy and Jocelyn did their part as always, keeping me fed and telling me when I was not allowed to go outside without a hat. They had keen antennae, both of them, for my loneliness. I could be doing homework in my room and Sandy would knock on the door. “Come study downstairs,” she would say, then turn around without giving me the chance to answer. I would go, algebra book in hand. In the kitchen, Jocelyn would turn off her little radio and pull out a chair for me.

“Everybody thinks better around food.” She sliced off the heel from a loaf of bread she’d made and buttered it for me. I have always been partial to the heel.

“We got a postcard from Maeve,” Sandy said, and pointed to a card caught to the refrigerator with a magnet, the Barnard library covered in snow. The fact that the card was displayed was proof that Andrea never went in the kitchen. “She says we should keep feeding you.”

Jocelyn nodded. “We hadn’t planned to feed you once she left, but if Maeve says we have to then we have to.”

Maeve wrote me long letters, telling me about New York and her classes and her roommate, a girl named Leslie who worked the dinner shift in the cafeteria every night as part of her financial aid package and then fell asleep in her clothes while she tried to study in bed. Maeve gave no indication that school was difficult or that she was homesick, though she always said she missed me. Now that she wasn’t around to help me with my homework, I wondered for the first time who had ever helped her when she was young. Fluffy? I doubted it. I sat down at the kitchen table and opened my book.

Sandy looked over my shoulder. “Let me see that. I used to be good in math.”

“I’ve got it,” I said.

“You only think you want to get rid of your sister,” Jocelyn said, clapping her hand on my shoulder in a firm manner so as not to embarrass me. “Then when she’s gone it turns out you miss her.”

Sandy laughed and swatted Jocelyn with a dish towel.

She was only right about half of it. I had never wanted to get rid of Maeve. “Do you have a sister?” I asked Jocelyn.

Sandy and Jocelyn had both been laughing and then at the same time they stopped. “Are you kidding me?” Jocelyn asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said, wondering what had been funny and then not funny, but in the second before they could correct me, I saw it: the similarity in these two women I had known before knowing.

Sandy cocked her head. “Danny, seriously? You didn’t know we were sisters?”

In that moment I could have told them all the ways they favored each other and all the ways they looked nothing alike, but it wouldn’t have mattered. I had never wondered who they were related to or who they went home to. All I knew was that they cared for us. I remembered Sandy being gone for two weeks when her husband was sick and then again for a few days when he died. “I didn’t know.”

“That’s because I’m so much prettier,” Jocelyn said. She was trying to be funny, to let me off the hook, but I couldn’t see that one was prettier than the other. They were younger than my father and older than Andrea but I couldn’t narrow it down any further than that. I knew not to ask. Jocelyn was taller and thinner, her hair an unnatural shade of blond, whereas Sandy, whose thick brown hair was always held back with two barrettes, maybe had the nicer face. Her cheeks were pink and she had very pretty eyebrows, if such a thing were even possible. I didn’t know. Jocelyn was married, Sandy a widow. Both of them had children, I knew that because Maeve gave them whatever clothes we’d outgrown. I knew because when one of their children was really sick they didn’t come to work. Did I ask them when they came back, who was sick? Is she better now? I did not. I liked them both so much, Sandy and Jocelyn. I felt terrible for failing them.

Sandy shook her head. “Boys,” she said, and with that single word excused me from all responsibility.

There was a phone at the front desk of the dorm where Maeve lived. I had the number memorized. If I called her, some girl would be dispatched to the third floor to knock on her door and see if she was in, which she usually wasn’t because Maeve liked to study in the library. That whole transaction to find out she wasn’t there and then leave a message took at least seven minutes—approximately four minutes longer than my father thought a long-distance call should last. So while I was desperate to talk to my sister and ask her if she knew—and if she did know then ask her how she’d neglected to tell me—I didn’t call. I went into the drawing room where I stood in front of her portrait, cursing quietly to myself under her benevolent ten-year-old gaze. I resolved to wait until Saturday and ask my father instead. With every passing day the similarities between Sandy and Jocelyn became glaringly obvious: I saw it every morning as they stood side by side in the kitchen when I left to catch the school bus, I saw it in the way they waved like a couple of synchronized swimmers, and of course they had exactly the same voice. I realized I had never known which one of them was calling for me when I was upstairs. What could have been wrong with me that I’d missed all that?

“What difference does it make?” my father said when finally it was Saturday and we were off to collect the rent.

“But you knew .”

“Of course I knew. I hired them, or your mother hired them. Your mother was always hiring people. First there was Sandy and then a couple of weeks later Sandy said that her sister needed a job, so we wound up with the pair. You’ve always been perfectly nice to them. I don’t see the problem.”

The problem, I wanted to say, was that I was asleep to the world. Even in my own house I had no idea what was going on. My mother hired them because she knew they were sisters, meaning she was a good person. I didn’t even know they were sisters, meaning I was a toad. But that’s me layering the present onto the past. At the time, I couldn’t have begun to say why I was so upset. For weeks I tried to avoid Sandy and Jocelyn whenever I could, but that was impossible. Finally, I resolved to believe that I had always known who they were to each other, and that I had forgotten.

Sandy and Jocelyn had always run the house with complete autonomy. Maybe on occasion we would tell them how nice it would be to have beef stew with dumplings again, or that wonderful apple cake, but even that was rare. They knew what we liked and they gave it to us without our needing to ask. We never ran out of apples or crackers, there were always stamps in the left-hand drawer of the library desk, clean towels in the bathroom. Sandy ironed not only our clothes but our sheets and pillowcases. There was always a bright row of silver-topped insulin bottles that shivered on the refrigerator door whenever Maeve was home. They sterilized syringes, back in the day before they were disposable. We would never tell them the laundry needed doing or a floor needed cleaning because everything was done before we’d had the chance to notice.