Энн Пэтчетт - The Dutch House

It had been two weeks.

“Look at you,” Sandy said, reaching up to put her hands on my shoulders. I thought her hair was grayer. There were tears in her eyes.

Sandy and Jocelyn hugged us and kissed us in a way they never had at home. Jocelyn was wearing dungarees and Sandy had on a cotton skirt with cheap tennis shoes. They were regular people now, not the people who worked for us. Still, they handed over one big jar of minestrone soup (Maeve’s favorite) and another of beef stew (mine).

“You can’t feed us!” Maeve said.

“I’ve always fed you,” Jocelyn said.

Sandy took a skeptical glance around the living room. “I could come by every now then, help you keep things up.”

Maeve laughed. “How could I not keep this clean?”

“You have a job,” Sandy said, looking down and running the toe of her shoe across the floor. “You don’t need to worry about keeping house on top of everything else. Anyway, how long could the whole thing take me, an hour?”

“I can do it,” I said, and the three of them looked at me like I was suggesting I make my own clothes. “Maeve won’t let me get a job.”

“Stick to basketball,” Sandy said.

“And making decent grades,” Jocelyn said.

Maeve nodded. “Let’s just wait for a little bit, see how we do.”

“We’re doing fine, really,” I said.

Sandy disappeared into the bedroom and came back five seconds later, looking at me. “Where do you sleep?”

“Does he know how to take care of you?” Jocelyn asked my sister.

Maeve waved her hand. “I’m fine.”

“Maeve,” Jocelyn said. It’s a funny thing to say but she was being stern. Sandy and Jocelyn were never stern with Maeve.

“I take care of everything.”

Jocelyn turned to me. “I have found your sister passed out cold on more than one occasion. Sometimes she forgets to eat or she doesn’t take enough of her insulin. Sometimes it’s nothing she’s done wrong but her sugar goes off all the same. You’ve got to keep an eye on her, especially when things are stressful. She’ll tell you stress has nothing to do with it, but it does.”

“Stop,” Maeve said.

“She has sugar tablets. You make her show you where she keeps them, make sure she has extras in her purse. If she’s in trouble you have to give her a sugar tablet and call an ambulance.”

I tried to take in the thought of Maeve on the floor. “I know that,” I said, keeping my voice steady. I knew about the insulin but not the sugar. “She showed me.”

Maeve sat back, smiling. “Straight from the horse’s mouth.”

Jocelyn looked at us for a minute, then shook her head. “You’re appalling, both of you, but it doesn’t matter. Now that he knows about it he’ll make you show him. You’ll bug her once we leave, won’t you Danny?”

Even though I was sensitive to the fluctuation of Maeve’s blood sugar, I realized I didn’t know the details. I knew how to stand by and watch her take care of herself, but that was not the same thing as taking care of her. Jocelyn was right though, because I would make Maeve explain everything to me once they were gone. “I will.”

“You know I’ve been living in this apartment by myself all this time, don’t you?” Maeve said. “It’s not like Danny’s been riding his bike over here at night to give me injections.”

“Or you can call me,” Jocelyn said, ignoring her completely. “I’ll tell you everything you need to know.”

Sandy had found a job keeping house in Elkins Park. “They’re nice enough. Not as much money,” she said, “and not as much work.” Jocelyn had found a family to cook for in Jenkintown but she also had to help with the two children and was expected to walk the dog. Not as much money and considerably more work. The sisters laughed. Better to have been fired, was what they said. That made it a badge of honor. They wouldn’t have stayed in that house a minute without me anyway.

“Once I get settled I’m going to try to talk my family into hiring Jocelyn. They need a cook. That way we could be together again,” Sandy said.

Had I handled the situation better and not been critical—not just at the end but for all the years Andrea had been in our lives—Sandy and Jocelyn would still be sitting together at the blue kitchen table, shelling peas and listening to the radio.

Sandy was looking up at the ceiling, the windows, like she was measuring the place in her head. “Why didn’t you move into one of your father’s buildings?” she asked my sister.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Maeve said. She was still flustered about the insulin.

Jocelyn took the spot beside Sandy on the couch. Maeve had the chair and I sat on the floor. “I didn’t think about it when you got this place but it doesn’t make any sense,” Sandy said. “You must have really had to work to find an apartment building in this town your father didn’t own.”

I’d wondered about it myself. The only reason I could come up with was that she had asked him for an apartment and he’d said no.

Maeve looked at us, the three of us, all the family she had. “I thought I would impress him.”

“With this place?” Sandy leaned over and straightened a stack of my school books on the coffee table in front of her.

Maeve smiled again. “I made out a budget and this was what I could afford. I thought he’d notice that I hadn’t asked him for anything, that I’d saved up my spending money from my last year of school. I had first and last month’s rent. I got the job. I bought the bed and then the next month I bought the couch and then I bought the chair at Goodwill. You know him, the way he liked to go on about the wonders of poverty, how making it all by yourself was the only way to learn anything. I thought I was showing him I wasn’t like the rich girls I knew from school. I wasn’t waiting around for him to buy me a horse.”

Sandy laughed. “I never thought anyone was going to buy me a horse.”

“Well, that’s just fine.” Jocelyn smiled. “I know he was proud of you, the way you did all this yourself.”

“He didn’t notice,” Maeve said.

Sandy shook her head. “Of course he did.”

But Maeve was right. He’d never seen what she had meant to show him. He had no notion of her self-reliance. The only thing my father ever saw in my sister was her posture.

Maeve made coffee and she and Jocelyn smoked while Sandy and I watched them. We ate the cookies and dredged up every awful memory of Andrea we had. We traded them between us like baseball cards, exclaiming over every piece of information one of us didn’t already know. We talked about how late she slept and every unflattering dress she’d worn and how she would spend an hour on the phone with her mother but would never invite her mother to the house. She wasted food and left the lights on all night and gave no evidence of having ever read a book. She’d sit by the pool for hours just staring at her fingernails and then expect Jocelyn to bring her lunch on a tray. She didn’t listen to our father. She gave away Maeve’s bedroom. She threw me out. We dug a pit and roasted her.

“Can anyone explain to me why he married her in the first place?” Maeve asked.

“Sure.” Jocelyn didn’t need to give it a thought. “Andrea loved the house. Your father thought that house was the most beautiful thing in the world and he found himself a woman who agreed.”

Maeve threw her hands up. “Everyone agreed! It’s not like it would have been so hard to find a decent woman who liked the house.”

Jocelyn shrugged. “Well, your mother hated it and Andrea loved it. He thought he’d solved the problem. But I got to her, didn’t I? Saying all that about your mother.”

Sandy covered her face with her hands and laughed. “I thought she was going to drop dead right on the spot.”