Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

“Sweetheart,” he said to Hattie. He sat down next to her on the stairs. Then he sighed almost happily and clapped his hands. “So! What will you study in school?”

I could see her shiver: who knew it would be this easy? “English?” she said.

He nodded. “And Mose—”

I sat up. I thought he’d say something to comfort me, because I sorely needed comfort.

“—when it’s your time, you can go, too. Iowa City has a fine business school. My smart children.” He smiled, as though the principal had come to the house to give him this gift: a son and a daughter capable of learning. It was so odd to see them together, Hattie and my father, the two halves of my life at last conspiring over my future. My father had his arm around Hattie’s waist.

I’d thought I’d known everything about Hattie. How could I not? My favorite sister, my best pal: of course I knew her. I knew, for instance, the matter-of-fact syncopated feel of her hip beneath my hand as we waltzed, first dignified, then faster and faster, till one then the other of us lifted off the ground; eventually we got airborne at the same time, a trick we imagined looked both easy and impossible. I knew, when we tried some little piece of patter, dancing side by side, how to wait until she was done, first with the joke and then with the step, before I answered with another joke, and then another step. After practice, while she plotted our career — we’d go to Chicago first, a big city but still midwestern — I knew not to interrupt her as she scratched a map with the toe of her shoe in the dirt, or wound her hair on the back of her head in an attempt to look older. In other words, I understood her timing, and I believed that meant I understood her soul.

Now that I’ve been in the business for seventy years, I know the difference.

I don’t remember what became of Hattie’s diploma, though her graduation dress was ruined. “I hate it,” she said after we got back from the ceremony at the high school. She looked wonderful. Clever Ed Dubuque had made it out of white silk; it had a dropped waist and a boat neck that showed off her throat.

“I feel like a doll.” She nibbled on the edge of a cookie.

“You look like a doll,” said Annie, thinking this a compliment. We sat in the parlor, the three children left (Annie, me, Rose) and the one who was leaving. The married sisters had come to the ceremony and fussed over Hattie and then gone off to their families. My father had already returned to the store.

“So,” said Annie. “What will you study?”

“I’d like to be a lawyer,” Hattie said, not looking at me.

“ I’d like to be a bird,” said Annie.

A lawyer? She’d been promising me: after college, vaudeville. Maybe even before: I’d come to Iowa City in two years and then we’d make our escape without having to run away from home.

I looked at Hattie, but she stared up at Rabbi Kipple. She looked ready for a portrait herself, a graduation portrait, which in fact she intended to pose for the next day at the Stamp and Photograph Gallery in Des Moines. She frowned, as though already wrestling with a tricky legal question. A lawyer? I tried to catch her eye the way I always did, by simply wanting her to look at me. Suddenly, I knew the truth. She would become a lawyer, and if I complained, she’d say that I could become a lawyer too. Like Annie, I’d never heard of a lady lawyer before — that’s why she said she’d like to be a bird; to her it was as unlikely — but I knew that Hattie would do it. She would forget about me. She would leave me to run the store.

I hadn’t even wanted to be a dancer before her (a ridiculous thought, because when did I ever have a before Hattie ? She had a before Mose , but I had been born into the partnership). She’d come up with the whole plan. She’d taught me. I had been a boy who never gave a thought to the future, except I didn’t want to be a shopkeeper, and I knew that because Hattie told me. I was sixteen years old. Now I don’t know which is more ludicrous: that I had thought, before this moment, that my future was assured, or that I thought, after this moment, that it was destroyed.

“Excuse me,” said Hattie, and left the room.

If I opened my mouth I’d burst into tears. I felt babyish there on the sofa, dressed up for Hattie’s graduation, a cookie crumbling in my hand. My shoes were polished, and I wanted to muddy them. A lawyer? Yes, we can be partners, Sharp and Sharp. (Would Sharp be a good name for a lawyer, or bad?) Hattie was smarter than me, of course she was: I just hadn’t realized how clearly she knew that.

Forget it. I’d be a single. I’d tap-dance and sing. I’d put together a minstrel act just to spite her, because she hated minstrel acts. The Sharp Boy. A lawyer . What snobbishness. We’d always said we’d be hoofers. Well, I still would.

Rose, sitting on the sofa next to me, said, “I’ll be your dance partner, if you want.”

The front of her dress was flocked with powdered sugar from the cookies. I patted her hand absentmindedly. “Maybe,” I said, but who could replace Hattie? Not my twelve-year-old sister, she of the bad eyesight and knock knees. No, I’d have to work the act over into something I could do alone.

First, though, I’d take the shine off my shoes. Outside it was a cloudy June day; I walked into the backyard and looked at the elm and thought about climbing it, to prove that my fear of heights had to do with Hattie, and now that we were no longer partners I could do anything. I have since learned that this theory is sound: if someone is willing to be brave for you, you are less likely to be brave yourself.

“Who needs her?” I said aloud. “Not me.”

From behind me: a soft scraping. I turned around.

There was Hattie, on top of the house. Behind her, the sky was gray, the sun a silk patch on a wool blanket. The birds who flew by were birds; they wanted to fly, so they did. Hattie walked along the peak of the roof as though it were a tightrope. She must not have heard me; she didn’t glance down. Maybe she was just looking east to Iowa City. Maybe she wanted to be a bird, too.

I forgave her, mostly. That is to say, I recognized her. She was still a person who was willing to climb out a window onto a roof. Still up for a stunt. Still Hattie, not a lawyer yet.

“Hey,” I said.

At the sound of my voice, she turned, then wobbled. For a minute I thought her clumsiness was a joke. She wheeled her arms in the air. In her white dress against the gray sky, she looked like a movie, dappled and imprecise, clearly an actual person but not really moving like one.

Then she slid. She fell to her knee, to her stomach. Then her whole body flipped onto her shoulder. I’d seen her do things like that before: a body is an object you can throw around from the inside, like this — then she’d cartwheel or somersault or she’d just stand and pick me up by my ankles and hoist, and before I fell to the ground I’d think I could fly. She said when I was bigger I’d have to catch her.

Now she was the one who flew. She came to the edge of the roof. Her hands kept scrambling to grab hold of something. I watched her without understanding: at any moment I thought she’d manage to stop and save herself; she’d get her fingers around a shingle, or she’d come to rest sitting at the gutter, or she’d grab a limb of the elm like a trapeze. Then she wailed, a noise I can still hear, she was calling for help, and that unstuck my feet: I was supposed to be doing something. I ran to the edge of the house and put out my hands to catch her, the way she’d been trying to teach me. I waited for her to land in my arms. I waited to learn the trick.